


Roll Down Like Waters

by gooseberry



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Codependency, Family Feels, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Torture, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-01-16 00:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12331518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: “Okay,” Shiro says breathlessly. “This is okay.” He licks his lips, then shifts a little so his crouch is steadier. Keith is watching him closely, his eyes moving between Shiro’s face and Shiro’s hands, and Shiro breathes slowly for a few moments, trying to slow his racing heart.“Okay,” he says again, for his and Keith’s benefit, but also for Pidge’s. “Is that—is that a kid?”It is apparently the wrong thing to say. Pidge’s voice is crackling in his ear, asking,What? What kid? What are you talking about? Shiro, what kid?Keith, on the other hand, is shoving the little Galran behind him, snarling, “Don’t—”--In which Keith was held captive by the Galran empire, a little Galran kid was used as a threat/hostage against him, and Shiro's left to pick up the pieces.Shiro falls apart as he tries to figure out how to deal with Keith and the little Galran kid with whom Keith is now super codependent and in a pseudo-parent-child relationship.Also, Pidge is the most emotionally stable of them all, though Hunk's a close second. It's a whole lot of Team Castle of Lions feels.





	1. Chapter 1

> But let justice roll down like waters,  
>  and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  
>  Amos 5:24

He finds Keith in a cell.

It’s not like the cells that Shiro had lived in when he was the Champion—it’s smaller, for one, and it’s nearly empty. It’s dark, too—there are no bars, only solid metal walls, thick enough to cut off sound on either side. It’s like the cell that Shiro had found Slav in; it’s something designed for isolation and an uncertainty different from the kind Shiro had lived with as the Champion.

“This one?” Shiro asks in a whisper, and Pidge’s voice murmurs an _Uh-huh_ in his ear. Shiro grits his teeth, hard enough that his jaw aches, then runs his hand over the lock. 

Pidge’s already done her work, and the lock glows beneath Shiro’s palm. He catches the sound of the locks in the door disengaging, and then the door is sliding open, a quiet _swoosh_ that makes a pit yawn wide in Shiro’s stomach.

They know that Keith is alive. A Blade of Marmora has been keeping them updated: _The Red Paladin is alive_ and _He is being kept by the druids_ ; _He seems well enough_ and _He seems unharmed_. _Well enough_ , though, can mean a lot of different things. Shiro’s a testament of that, which is why he’s the one at Keith’s cell. 

He knows Keith the best, and he knows the Galra the best, too, and that means he’s the best bet if (or when—there are lot of _ifs_ that are actually _whens_ ) Keith is no-longer-Keith, just like Shiro is no-longer-Shiro.

Shiro licks his lips, then takes two steps so that he’s standing just outside the track of the door. The cell is unlit, but the light from the hallway behind Shiro stretches a couple yards into the cell, making a sharply lit trapezoid on the floor and throwing the rest of the cell into indistinct shadows. Shiro blinks as his eyes begin to adjust, then turns enough that his face will be in profile, so that he’s not an anonymous silhouette standing in the doorway.

“Keith?” he asks, and he feels his heartbeat begin to speed up when he hears a rustle from inside the cell.

“Keith,” he says, and he tucks his shoulders in, turns a little more to the side so his silhouette will be smaller. “It’s me, Shiro.”

The rustling sound is coming from what must be the far wall, where the shadows blur together. Shiro squints at the shadows, then says, “I’m going to step inside, Keith. Okay?”

Stepping into cells always feels like stepping into freezing water. It feels like his lungs have been caught in a vice, his heart beating so heavily and painfully that he thinks he might be having a heart attack. His palms feel hot and itchy beneath the gloves, and he knows he’s sweating. He hates this—hates cells and the Galra and everything about the last few years of his life. He hates the way he can feel his stomach rising to his throat.

He swallows down the thing stuck in his throat—vomit or a scream or both—and says, his voice sounding far steadier than he feels, “Keith. Buddy. I’m here to get you out, okay?”

The cell’s not a quarter as deep as Shiro’s first cell had been. By the time Shiro’s taken three steps in, he can make out the far wall—only a few steps farther—and his eyes have adjusted well enough to pick out the different objects in the shadows against the wall: a cot, and a figure huddled on it.

“Keith,” Shiro says again, like if he says it enough, the Keith he has found will be the Keith he used to know; Keith, not no-longer-Keith. (He knows that Keith used to say his name— _Shiro, Shiro, Shiro, Shiro_ —for the same reason. Like if he said it often enough, at some kind of golden ratio, he could help Shiro be Shiro again, and not no-longer-Shiro.) The figure moves, just barely enough that Shiro can catch it in the gloom, and Shiro says, unable to stop himself, “Keith.”

The figure—Keith or no-longer-Keith—doesn’t say anything, but it does breathe in heavily. It sounds a lot like the way Shiro’s sister used to breathe in before she was about to throw a temper tantrum, and the way Shiro’s dad used to breathe in before he was going to scold someone. It sounds like the way Shiro used to breathe in before he was going to dive, sucking in all the air he could get into his lungs. It’s the same way Shiro used to breathe in before he walked into the gladiator ring. The figure breathes in again, just as heavy, and Shiro sinks down to a crouch on the floor.

“I’m gonna turn on a light, okay?” Shiro says as he fumbles at the belt of his armor. His fingers are still itchy and hot, and they feel clumsy and fat—as clumsy and fat as his tongue. 

The flashlight is Altean, same as Shiro’s armor, and the light it casts is the same cool blue as the lights in the Castle of Lions. Shiro points the light toward the floor, at a point halfway between himself and the cot. He’s lower than the cot now, and when he looks up, the flashlight is casting enough light that he can make out Keith, his face pale and cold-looking in the blueish light—and, just beyond Keith’s shoulder, another face.

The face behind Keith—the person behind Keith—is smaller and darker than Keith’s, and it is distinctly Galran.

It’s Shiro’s turn to breathe in heavily, a sharp inhale that feels like glass in his lungs. Shiro’s gasp makes Keith react: his eyes narrow, like he’s preparing for a blow, or for a blinding light to be shone in his eyes, and he shifts to side, blocking Shiro’s view of the Galran. The Galran is making noises, and Shiro’s brain fuzzily puzzles it out, realizes that the sounds are whimpers, or maybe crying—that kind of crying kids do when they’re trying to be quiet so the monsters under the bed won’t hear them. Shiro stares at the dark shadows behind Keith’s shoulder, where the Galran is hiding, and he watches how little fingers, capped with little claws, tug at Keith’s shoulder, and he watches how Keith’s shoulders curve and bow, how Keith covers the dark little fingers with his own hand and holds on tight. 

“Okay,” Shiro says, feeling breathless for all that he’s breathing more heavily than he has since he was the Champion. He wants to cover his face with his hands, but Keith is curved forward, staring at Shiro like he doesn’t know who Shiro is—like he doesn’t trust who Shiro is. Like Keith is feral, or maybe rabid.

(The thought springs to the front of Shiro’s brain, a bizarre memory: a classic novel from the last century that had been required reading in middle school, about a little girl and her brother and her dad. There’d been a rabid dog in the town, and the girl’s dad had shot it dead in the street. Shiro’s English teacher had shown them videos of dogs with rabies, feral and mad and snapping foaming jaws.

The thought springs up to the front of Shiro’s brain, and it lodges there; Shiro can’t stop himself from looking at Keith’s mouth, wondering if Keith will foam at the mouth, if he’ll snap his teeth and infect Shiro with a new kind of madness.)

 _Shiro?_ Pidge asks, her voice a secret in his ear. _Shiro, are you okay? Is Keith okay?_

“Okay,” Shiro says breathlessly. “This is okay.” He licks his lips, then shifts a little so his crouch is steadier. Keith is watching him closely, his eyes moving between Shiro’s face and Shiro’s hands, and Shiro breathes slowly for a few moments, trying to slow his racing heart.

“Okay,” he says again, for his and Keith’s benefit, but also for Pidge’s. “Is that—is that a kid?”

It is apparently the wrong thing to say. Pidge’s voice is crackling in his ear, asking, _What? What kid? What are you talking about? Shiro, what kid?_

Keith, on the other hand, is shoving the little Galran behind him, snarling, “ _Don’t_ —”

And then, just as abrupt, Keith’s collapsing in on himself, his shoulders curving in and his body hunching over. His breathing sounds ragged, almost like a whistle, and when he speaks again, his voice is thin and desperate sounding, a far cry from the threatening tone from a moment before.

“Don’t,” he says in that thin voice. “Please, don’t— I’ll do whatever, just don’t—”

Shiro gets it. He thinks of Matt and Sam Holt, and he gets it. He knows how the prison guards and druids use the prisoners against each, how the strongest power in a place like this is the threat of violence—and he understands the cell now, the darkness and the silence; he understands the solitude that has to have crept beneath Keith’s skin, the desperation for any kind of contact.

Shiro has built himself on a foundation of others; his identity is all wrapped up in other people and how he relates to them, as a student or a mentor or a friend or a leader. He knows how easy it is, to get wrapped up in another person, to be as dependent on caring for someone else as they’re dependent on being cared for. 

He looks at Keith and the shadows just behind Keith, and he thinks, _There go I, but for the grace of God._

 _Shiro?_ Pidge’s voice asks in his ear, and Shiro taps the side of his helmet, saying to Keith,

“Keith, I’m going to talk to Pidge for a minute, okay? I’m going to tell her about your kid, okay? But I’m not going to touch you, neither of you. Okay?”

Keith doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t look away, either. Shiro lowers his eyes, looking at the edge of the cot on Keith’s right, away from where the Galran is hidden. Shiro taps his helmet again, hoping the gesture communicates—what? Something, though he doesn’t even know what he’s hoping. Just something.

“Hey, Pidge,” he says, slow and easy and as stressless as he can make his cadence, “I found Keith. It looks like he’s got a friend. A kid, I think.”

 _In his cell?_ Pidge asks. _Is it just the two of them? Why did they— Oh._

Pidge’s _Oh_ is an awful sounding thing, and Shiro knows that Pidge understands, too. 

_Okay_ , Pidge’s voice says in his ear. _Okay, that’s— It’s okay. It doesn’t change anything, not—not really. Are they— Does he recognize you? Shiro?_

Shiro doesn’t know how to answer that, doesn’t even know how to look at Keith and keep himself objective enough to gauge some kind of—of—of what? Gauge Keith’s responses, decide whether it’s Keith or no-longer-Keith? 

(He knows Keith the best by dint of knowing Keith the longest, just like how he knows the Galra the best because he’s lived with the Galra for the longest. Now, as Shiro stares at the edge of the cot, just past Keith’s bent knee, he thinks maybe that’s why he shouldn’t be the one who’s here right now. He doesn’t know how to be objective about this, how to see what’s really there instead of what he wants to see. 

He doesn’t even know how to look up at Keith’s face, because he can’t stop thinking about rabid dogs with their white-foam mouths.)

“Pidge says hi,” he says instead, and when Keith makes a tiny, clicking sound in his mouth—like someone tsking their tongue—he lifts his eyes just enough to see Keith’s washed-out face. Keith is staring down at Shiro, his face all crumpled up like he’s never been more miserable. Keith’s always worn his emotions on his sleeve—the problem is that rage and fear and pain and crazy can look a lot alike.

“You wanna say hi back?” Shiro asks Keith. When Keith turns his face away, Shiro says to Pidge, with all the false nonchalance he can muster, “Keith says hi, Pidge.”

 _It’s gonna be fine_ , Pidge says, like she gets it. Maybe she does. She’s a smart kid, one of the smartest Shiro’s ever met. She probably dreams about her brother and her dad, probably imagines what’s been done to them, what threats hang over their heads. She probably knows all about prisoner of war camps and psychological torture and just how easy it can be to break the human will. Anything, with the right angle and the right pressure, will break.

“She’s looking forward to seeing you,” Shiro says to Keith, like there’s a real conversation going here, like it’s not just Shiro stumbling through this mess, probably making it a bigger mess. Pidge, though, is breathing in his ear, a steady one-two rhythm, and Shiro closes his eyes for a moment, tries to match it. 

“She’s gonna help us out,” he says, to Keith and to himself, and maybe even to the little Galran kid cowering behind Keith. “She’ll lead us out, get us back to the Black Lion. It’ll be fine. Trust me.”

And when Keith makes that tsking, clicking noise again, like he’s half-heartedly scolding someone, Shiro asks, “Do you trust me, Keith?”

And then: “Do you know me? Keith?”

Keith doesn’t sigh, or at least not audibly, but his shoulders shift like he wants to. He’s turned his face back toward Shiro, his face still miserable and pinched looking. Shiro licks his lips—his mouth and throat feel so dry—and asks again:

“Do you know who I am, Keith?”

Movement catches his eye: the kid is just barely visible behind Keith, and its left ear is flicking forward and back. Shiro blinks, then refocuses his eyes on Keith, smiling closed-mouthed at him.

Keith is watch Shiro steadily. The beam from the flashlight, directed at the floor, is reflected as a dull gleam in Keith’s eyes, gone and back again when Keith blinks. (Shiro wonders if this is how much all humans eyes reflect light, if—should all the paladins be sitting side by side—Keith’s eyes would reflect the light the same as Pidge’s and Hunk’s and Lance’s, or if Keith’s eyes are just a _little bit more_.)

“I know.” 

Shiro waits patiently, smiling without teeth, until Keith makes a sound like a half-hearted, frustrated sigh.

“Shiro,” Keith says. His voice sounds hopeless, like he’s admitting something he doesn’t want to. It turns Shiro’s stomach, but he waits and listens as Keith says: “I know you’re Shiro, I just don’t know if you’re real.”

“Alright,” Shiro says. “Keith, what do I need to do? What will convince you I’m real?”

Keith breathes out through his nose, something that’s almost loud enough to be called a snort. Shiro thinks that, in another place, on another day, maybe Keith would look peevish. Now, though, and here, he just looks hopeless.

“Doesn't work like that,” Keith says. “You can just—” He lifts his hand, just enough to flap it awkwardly next to his head, kinda like he’s fanning himself. “My head. My brain.”

That is something Shiro can’t think about it. That’s something worse that the rabid-dog thoughts, and he turns his thoughts away from, makes himself look away from Keith’s hand flapping next to his head—next to his fragile, brittle skull. 

“Keith,” Shiro says, “Buddy. I’m gonna get us outta here, but I need you to trust me so we can do that, okay? So I need to— Keith, how do I get you to trust me?”

Keith’s face does something like a spasm, his lips thinning and turning down in this weirdly overdramatic way, like Keith’s trying to mimic a drama mask. When Keith moves, it’s to shift a little more to the left on the cot, and Shiro doesn’t miss how Keith’s put himself more completely between Shiro and the Galran kid, and he doesn’t miss how Keith reaches behind himself with his left hand, probably to touch the kid, make sure it’s still safely hidden behind Keith. 

(If they don’t get out of this cell soon, Shiro thinks he might lose his mind.)

“Doesn’t matter,” Keith says, still hopeless sounding. “I won’t— I’ll do what you want. Whatever you want. Just don’t—”

 _Running out of time_ , Pidge’s voice interrupts in Shiro’s ear, echoing the thoughts that have been creeping in the back of Shiro’s head and in the roots of his teeth. _We’ve got to go_.

“We’ve got to go,” Shiro repeats aloud, and he doesn’t think about Keith saying, _Whatever you want_. He doesn’t let himself think about Keith saying, _Just don’t—_

He rises to his feet slowly, with an overly exaggerated grunt. Keith’s eyes follow Shiro up, and Shiro keeps up his closed-mouth smile, holding out his hand and leaving a good two feet between him and Keith. “Help you up?”

Keith moves slowly, shifting forward onto the cot, then leaning his weight forward, using the momentum to rise to his feet. He’s moving like an old man, like he’s tired and weak and in pain. Shiro closes his open hand and lets it hang at his side, watching as Keith straightens with a grimace that’s obvious even in the darkness of the room.

“Let’s go,” Keith says, but not to Shiro—he’s turned to look back at the kid on the cot, and he’s holding open his arms. Shiro takes a couple steps back, giving them plenty of room, and watches as the kid climbs into Keith’s arms, clinging to Keith like a burr. 

When Shiro leaves the cell, he can hear Keith following him obediently. It makes him think of that myth—the one about the guy who walked into death to find his wife, then led her all the way out, not sure she was behind him. He’d looked back, Shiro remembers, and because of that, his wife had to go back to death. Once the idea pops into his head, it’s just like the rabid dog thought—Shiro can’t get rid of it, can’t stop his brain from picking at it, can’t stop his stomach from turning over, can’t stop his lungs from squeezing up. If he turns now, and looks back—if he turns now, and looks back—if he turns now, and looks _back_ —

He turns, and he looks back, and when Keith catches his eyes, Shiro offers him a smile that feels as flimsy as tissue paper.

“Doing okay?” Shiro asks in a hushed voice.

Keith nods, a sharp movement, and tightens his grip on the kid enough that Shiro can see the strain in Keith’s muscles and knuckles. The kid is holding onto Keith just as tightly, its arms looped around Keith’s neck, its legs wrapped around Keith’s waist. Its face is tucked into Keith’s shoulder; Shiro can see its ears lying flat against its head, and he thinks he can hear it whimpering into Keith’s shoulder.

Shiro nods back and tries to stamp back the thought that sometimes, being sent back to death must be the kinder option.

They move through the Galran ship, following Pidge’s directions, Keith following Shiro like a shade. Then Shiro turns left again, toward the hallway that leads to the hangar, and feels his shade pull away. 

He stops, feeling his stomach twist into that yawning hole. It feels like his bones are sinking down, rooting him into the metal floor beneath him, and he can’t move. He has to look back, but he can’t look back, and he thinks, _I looked back, and now Keith has gone back—_

 _Why did you stop?_ Pidge’s voice asks softly in his ear, all filled up with concern and fear.

It feels like the wrong question. Stopping—he wonders why he hadn’t stopped before. He’s tired. He’s so fucking tired. It feels like someone’s poured cement into his bones, and he just wants to lie down and close his eyes and sleep. He wants to be done. He wants to go back to that Galran cell he’d been thrown into, and he wants to lie down and sleep.

 _Why_ , he asks himself, _do I keep going?_

 _Shiro?_ Pidge’s voice asks again, a tether in his ear, lashing him to all the responsibilities that have been dogging him since he left the Garrison. Shiro closes his eyes for a moment, squeezing them shut until they ache, then opens them again.

His first step—left foot, because his right is steadier and can bear his weight—is clumsy; his second is just as clumsy. It turns him enough that he can look back down the hallway to find his missing shade.

Keith is standing a few yards away, where the hallway branches out. He’s turned away from Shiro, looking down the far right hallway. Shiro breathes in, feeling it rasp through his dry throat and force his lungs open, then walks back to Keith; his steps are a little less clumsy.

“Keith,” he tries to say when he’s closer. It must not be as garbled as he feels it is, because Keith turns and looks at him. “Keith,” Shiro says again, “we’ve got to go.”

Keith looks past Shiro, down the left hallway that Shiro had started to take. 

“That’s the wrong way,” Keith says, that hopeless, lost-secret sound back in his voice. Keith’s eyes barely meet Shiro’s before Keith is making a tiny movement, like a spasm he can’t stop, toward the far right hallway. “The workrooms are this way.”

Everything becomes a bit garbled then. He can hear himself saying something about the hangars and the Black Lion, but it’s from a distance, like he’s listening to someone else talk. He feels himself moving, turning and walking down the left hallway with jerky, puppet-like movements. 

Why, he wonders, does he keep moving?


	2. Chapter 2

Confession time: Shiro has control issues.

They’re not like Keith’s. Keith’s control issues could spawn an entire series of books. Keith’s control issues are a thing of legend—something that, Shiro knows, the Garrison complained about loudly, and at great length.

Shiro’s control issues are tiny in comparison, and he’s got them under control, has learned how to turn them from weaknesses into strengths. 

It’s just that Shiro likes to have an out—needs to have an out, always. He’s always wanted to drive himself to any given event, and he’s always wanted to be in charge of group projects; he wants to control when and where and how, and while he’s all for group votes, he wants to be able to up and leave if things turn south.

It’s not that he doesn’t trust people. It’s that he doesn’t trust circumstance. He doesn’t trust the road to always be smooth. Someday, there’s gonna be a pothole, and Shiro wants to be driving himself, because he knows his own abilities a hell of a lot better than he’ll ever know anyone else’s. So, control issues. There’s no guarantee that a friend won’t leave him stranded, or a classmate’s harddrive won’t crash, or a stranger won’t swerve into his lane. The universe is fickle and haphazard, and Shiro really, really needs to know that in the end, he’s able to control his own reactions. 

They—being the control issues—got him pegged as leadership material all the way through school, labeled as a go-getter and most-likely-to-succeed. He’s got his control issues themselves under his control, using them when they’re helpful, strangling them up in his throat when they’re not, and it works—

At least, it worked until an alien ship popped into orbit over Kerberos, and then everything in Shiro’s life went to utter shit.

x

He doesn’t know how he gets the three of them onboard the Black Lion. It’s providence, maybe, or just sheer dumb luck. It feels a little bit—or maybe a lot bit—like he’s watching a puppet show, with someone else moving his body and speaking his lines. Maybe it’s like flipping through the channels of a TV, and every so many clicks, he tunes back into _As the Galran Empire Turns_ :

Click, click, and now Shiro is ducking around a corner, closing his eyes and breathing hard and praying that the kid doesn’t cry because there are sentries just a few feet away and they are— 

Click, click, click, and they’re in the hangar now, halfway toward the Black Lion, watching as a Galran soldier jogs out of the far door, distracted by— 

Click, click, and Shiro’s hands are wrapped around the Black Lion’s controls, and it’s purring in his head, and he’s telling Keith, “You need to hold on—”

 _Click_ , and they’re flying through space, stars in the distance and other ships up close, and everywhere else, everywhere else he can see, there’s emptiness. Just emptiness, between the stars and between the ships (and between the firing synapses in his own brain). And yeah. He can do this. Right. This—having his hands on the controls, seeing all the possibilities laid out in front of him in tangible obstacles, knowing where he needs to go and being able to control how he gets there—he can do. This is something he can deal with.

“Okay,” he can hear Keith hiss behind him, from somewhere just behind Shiro’s seat, low down to the floor like Keith is bracing himself against the base of the pilot’s seat, “okay, okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, and the words don’t feel as foreign this time, and his mouth doesn’t feel as distant and numb, “it’s okay. We’re good. We’re gonna be—we’re fine.”

 _You’re good?_ Pidge’s voice asks over the comms, in Shiro’s ear and in the cockpit. Right behind her, like he’s tripping over her words, Hunk’s asking, _Did you get him? Is he okay? Hey, Keith?_

If Keith hears Pidge and Hunk, there’s no sign of it. He keeps hissing his reassurances, impersonal ( _It’s okay_ ) and personal ( _You’re okay_ ) both. Shiro knows they’re not meant for him; he remembers what those assurances sounded like, the way Keith would say Shiro’s name like it was a spell to bring Shiro back to life. These assurances are for the kid, and for Keith himself; these assurances are like promises, and in their years of friendship, Shiro has always been the one to offer promises. 

Still, even if they aren’t meant for him, Shiro can’t stop himself from repeating them, saying, “We’re okay. It’s okay, we’re good—”

He doesn’t mean it as a promise, not the way he thinks Keith must mean it. Shiro doesn’t want to make any promises, because he’s not done so great on keeping any promises in the last couple years. The bigger the promise, the worse things go— _I’ll be back soon_ becomes _I tried to come back_ , and _I’ll take care of you_ becomes _Take care of yourself_ ; _It’ll be fine_ becomes _I don’t know how to get us home_.

(He’d promised his sister that he’d be home for her graduation, and he’d promised to go fishing with his mom, and he’d promised to take a couple months off to help his dad; he’d promised to be there, to make up for the years he was a student, and—well. Promises.)

So it’s not meant to be a promise. It’s statement of fact. Simple, clear, concise: _We’re good._. Present tense, because this is what they are right now. This is what they need to be. This is what he needs to be. Good. Fine. _Okay_.

 _You should head for the Castle,_ Pidge tells him. Her face is flashing up on the screen, and Shiro feels a wash of relief; she’s made it back to the Green Lion, and she seems fine. She, at least, doesn’t look like she’s clinging to her Lion’s controls, a hair’s breadth from getting lost in her own head. 

Shiro tries to loosen his grip on the Black Lion’s controls and, when he fails, instead says, “Yeah. We’re not really set up for any serious maneuvering. You’ll, uh, be okay—”

 _We’ll be fine,_ Pidge says—future tense; it’s a promise. It makes Shiro feel sick, and he feels his hands convulse on the controls. The view screen on either side of Pidge’s face shows empty space, and it’s easier to look at that; Shiro only looks back when Pidge asks, her voice in his ears and all around him, _Shiro?_

"Don't," Shiro says, “take any chances. Just keep our path clear, let us get a head start to the Castle.”

 _Sure,_ Lance chirps over the comms, and Shiro wonders how he forgot about him, how he didn’t wonder if Lance was okay.

He wonders if it’s a glaringly obvious to Pidge, and maybe to Hunk, as it is to him right now. Christ, he didn’t even ask for anyone’s status, didn’t even ask if everyone was there and alive and _fine_.

He presses harder on the controls, and the Black Lion jolts. Action, and reaction. He breathes, and blinks, and tells himself that this is fine, because it is. He’ll do better. It’s a statement, not a promise. He doesn’t have a choice, and there’s no other option. He’ll just—he’ll do better. He’ll be better. He’ll control this, just like he’s controlling the Black Lion, and it will be good. It will be better.

“Princess,” he says when he’s pinged the Castle’s comms. His voice is steady enough, back under his control, and he only has to clear his throat once. “I’ll be landing with Keith in a few moments. The others are behind us; they may come in hard.”

 _Understood,_ Allura’s voice says. _I’ll prepare a wormhole._

It feels like he’s sliding closer into alignment. It’s a series of tasks in front of him, concrete actions to be taken in order: approach the Castle; move to the starboard side; begin the landing sequence; enter the hangar; set down the Lion; check its status as it moves to its berth in the hangar; breathe, and breathe, and breathe. 

When the Black Lion has settled down in the hangar, Shiro leans forward in his seat, bending at the waist until the visor of his helmet has clinked against his poleyns. He’s still bent in half, breathing slowly, when he hears Lance’s voice say, _We’re in, we’re in, let’s go—_

A moment later, there’s that familiar yanking feeling at the bottom of his stomach. There’s an odd, wounded-animal kind of sound just behind him, where Keith and the kid are still tucked behind the pilot’s seat, and Shiro’s not sure which one of them made the sound. Shiro turns his head to the side and listens as the sound comes again. The kid—he thinks it may be the kid. It can’t be nice, riding through a wormhole like this, especially if the kid probably hasn’t been through one before.

“Wormhole,” Shiro offers, trying not to think of how his own stomach feels like it’s turning itself over and over again. “Allura’s getting us somewhere safe. Just—take a couple deep breaths, and it’ll pass.”

There’s no answer from the kid or Keith. Shiro tries to choke down his disappointment, and instead busies himself with detaching himself from the Black Lion, relaxing his hands until he’s let go of the controls, then shaking his left hand to rid himself of the pins and needles. When he finally twists around in his seat, enough that he can look down at where Keith is sitting with the kid, he finds Keith looking back up at him.

Keith looks the same here, in the Lion, as he had in the cell. He looks just a little bit wrong, like his eyes are too bright or his face is too pale or his mouth is too thin. It’s like someone took Keith and made an imperfect copy, something close enough to the original to be uncanny. Shiro clears his throat, then fails to say anything at all when Keith blinks and looks away.

 _Me too_ , Shiro tells himself. _I’m different, too._

And aloud, he says, “You can just take it easy for a couple minutes. I’ll just check the hangar. You can take your time, calm down a little.”

It feels a little stupid to say. Six months ago, it would’ve make sense—six months ago, Keith would’ve been spitting fire, abrasive and impatient and angry in a way Shiro always found incredible. The sheer depths of Keith’s emotions have always been baffling to Shiro; Shiro has never been able to really appreciate what it must be like, to have no control over his emotions.

Now, though, Keith is sitting quietly on the floor, his arms wrapped tightly around the kid. He’s tucked them both in firmly behind the seat, his legs stretched out to brace against the cockpit’s back wall. When Shiro stands and moves from the pilot’s seat, Keith only moves enough to turn his face toward the kid’s head.

Shiro can barely hear the sound of Keith whispering to the kid; the grinding of the Black Lion’s cockpit opening drowns out any chance of hearing the actual words.

Allura is waiting for Shiro when he finally leaves the cockpit. She’s frowning up at him, the way she frowns at any problem that faces her, and she says, before he’s even stepped off the ramp, “Pidge has informed me of the situation.”

She looks past him then, toward the Black Lion, and Shiro turns, looking back up at the Black Lion himself. When Allura speaks, it is to ask questions:

“You brought the child?”

And after Shiro nods, the question is:

“How bad is it?”

Shiro licks his lips, then reaches up, tugging off his helmet. The air of the Castle is cool and dry, and there’s an airflow coming from somewhere high up in the hangar. It feels wonderful against his skin, and he rubs the back of his neck with his right hand, the metal of his palm cold against his skin.

“Not awful,” he hedges, wondering if he’s lying to Allura and to himself, “but pretty bad. He never let me see the kid, but he didn’t try to fight me while we were leaving.”

And he’s careful to close his mouth then, to keep from saying, _He said he wouldn’t fight_ or _I think he thought I was a druid_. (He can’t stop thinking, though, of the way Keith had flapped his hand next to his head, the way Keith had said, _My head. My brain._ He can’t stop thinking of how he feels broken in his own head sometimes, like the world is too real then not real enough—like he can’t trust his own thoughts.)

Allura is nodding, and when Shiro looks more closely at her, her frown has turned thoughtful. 

“A smaller welcoming party would most likely be appreciated,” she says, almost like she’s talking to herself. She looks at Shiro then, and says more directly, “Pidge said that he recognized you, correct? He’s clearly comfortable enough to follow you to the Black Lion, so I believe it’d be best if Keith and the child were accompanied by you, and either myself or Coran.

“Coran,” she continues without a pause, “is the better option—he’s far more adept at handling the medical equipment—but I can do in a pinch.”

Then, when Shiro has remained silent, feeling overwhelmed and so fucking _thankful_ to have Allura handling this, Allura says in a gentle voice, “It is possible that Keith will feel uncomfortable with two men in the room.”

“Maybe not,” Shiro manages to say in a low voice, and he can’t stop himself from thinking of Haggar, her voice and her hands and how different she was from the other druids, how much smaller and more delicate and more terrifying she was. “He might—” Shiro rubs his hand harder against the back of his neck, then squeezes, his skin pinching beneath the smooth metal plates of his hand. “He’s seen you fight.”

When Allura reaches out to touch Shiro’s arm, Shiro wonders if she saw through him; if she looked at him, and remembered Haggar, and heard what Shiro couldn’t manage to say: _He might have been with Haggar; maybe she was in a room with him; maybe a woman is worse than a man._

“I think it would be best,” Allura says, in the voice she uses whenever she’s giving Shiro a list of tasks to be accomplished, a series of commands that puts everything back into order, “if you asked him who he would prefer.

“While you do,” she says, smiling at him, her hand still resting on his arm, a pressure he can barely feel through his armor, “I’ll go see to the others.”

And before she leaves the hangar, she says, “You’ve brought him back, Shiro.”

x

It’s not a disaster. 

A disaster would be Keith fighting Shiro every inch of the way, or Keith lashing out when he’s led through the infirmary doors, or Keith— _christ fuck, would he?_ —hurting the kid or himself. 

So, it’s not a disaster. Instead, it’s as placid as when Keith had followed Shiro from the cell, and this—the placidity of the situation, the sense of inevitability when Keith follows Shiro without protest—feels far worse.

When Shiro asks Keith who he’d prefer— _Coran or Allura? Either’s fine. It’s whatever makes you feel more comfortable, buddy_ —Keith says nothing. When Shiro pushes, gently as he can ( _Keith, I promise. We just want you to feel safe._ ), Keith shrugs, then finally says in a flat, empty kind of voice, “Coran, then.”

Shiro doesn’t know much about Altea, or about the war between Altea and the Galra, or about Altea’s history before the war; he also doesn’t know much about Coran, other than what Coran has loudly offered. What Shiro does know, from the things Coran’s said and, more importantly, the things that Coran’s done, is that Coran’s as brilliant as Pidge.

By the time Shiro reaches the infirmary, with Keith and the Galran kid in tow, the infirmary doesn’t really look like an infirmary at all, or at least looks a lot less like an infirmary than it did the day before. The beds have been pushed to the far wall, leaving the floor of the room mostly clear, and most all the equipment is gone, vanished into cabinets, or maybe into other rooms of the castle. The setup that’s left is some chairs in the middle of the room, and a short little table with what Shiro thinks is a medical scanner lying on top of it.

It’s not a homey setup, but it’s definitely not the sterile, mechanical room it used to be. Shiro can feel his own shoulders begin to loosen, and he wonders if Keith feels the same way.

(When Keith steps into the infirmary without a pause, without really looking around or even offering a token protest, Shiro fucking _prays_ that Keith feels the same way.)

“Welcome home, Keith,” Coran says brightly. He’s standing in the center of the room, his hands resting on the back of the chair farthest from the door. He’s smiling at them, only half as manic as he usually seems to smile, and even his voice seems toned down. Maybe he was with Allura when Pidge told her about the situation, or maybe Allura told him afterwards; either way, he doesn’t even blink at the kid, or at Keith’s silence. “I just want to ensure we’re all hale and hearty, so why don’t we take a seat—”

There are four chairs. Shiro takes the one to the right of Coran, and busies himself with staring at his own stupid hands after he’s sitting, only watching Keith’s movements out of the corner of his eyes.

Keith approaches the chair closest to Shiro slowly but steadily, with the same indifferent—or hopeless, or helpless; something far worse than indifferent—stride that he’s had since Shiro took him back. He pauses at the chairs, though, and Shiro wonders if Keith is looking at him, or maybe at Coran. Maybe Keith is weighing his options, or maybe Keith is testing the limits; whichever it is, Keith hooks a foot around the back leg of the chair, and he drags it back, farther from Coran and Shiro’s chairs. The chair legs squeal as they drag against the floor, and Shiro blinks hard.

It’s only one, maybe two paltry inches. Shiro wants to cry and beat someone half to death, and he doesn’t know if it’s because Keith’s rebelling, or it’s because Keith’s rebellion is something so insignificant and pitiable. 

They all say nothing about it: Coran says nothing, and Shiro says nothing, and Keith says nothing. When Shiro lifts his eyes from his hands, looking across the tiny space to Keith’s chair, Keith is looking away, towards a bunch of nothing in the far corner of the infirmary. The Galran kid is sitting on Keith’s lap, its arms and legs still wrapped tightly around Keith’s body, and its head is still tucked into Keith’s shoulder. It’s silent now, though, just as silent as Keith. The only sign of life from either of them, Keith or the kid, is the way they’re both breathing, Keith’s chest and the kid’s back rising and falling quickly, like they’ve both been running for miles.

The fourth chair stays empty.

When Shiro’s able to tear his eyes away from Keith and the kid, and stop himself from counting their breaths (too fast, like they’re about to hyperventilate), Coran is saying, “—a simple scan. It’s been calibrated in relation to your previous results. And, of course, it will be simple to recalibrate for a Galran child. You won’t have to move, but if you could sit up a bit straighter—”

Shiro doesn’t know how Keith can sit up any straighter. He’s already sitting on the edge of the seat, just the balls of his feet resting on the floor, like he’s ready to bolt. He doesn’t, though, not even when Coran picks up the medical scanner and leans forward. He doesn’t bolt, doesn’t protest, doesn’t roll his eyes or make a face or even look toward Shiro. He just _obeys_ , as compliant as the star Garrison student he never was.

This isn’t Keith, Shiro thinks, and the thought turns into a flood: Not Keith, not-Keith, no-longer-Keith, no more Keith, no Keith, never Keith—

“Well?” Shiro manages to ask, his voice strained and his throat tight. Coran makes a humming sound as the scanner beeps a series of trills, like a mechanical songbird. (Shiro thinks of songbirds and nightingales, and Shiro thinks, _I’m losing my fucking mind._ ) Keith looks over, though, just turning his head barely enough to glance at Shiro, and Shiro can’t make himself look away. 

Coran hums and haws through his evaluation: Contusions and a few minor scrapes; a mildly sprained knee and a more seriously sprained wrist; mild malnutrition and moderate dehydration; low body weight. It’s nothing that will lay up Keith for long, or even really lay Keith up at all. Shiro knows that Keith’s worked through far worse, and Coran must know it, too.

“A short stint in a pod,” Coran suggests, and Keith’s whole body goes stiff, his jaw clenched shut, his knuckles gone white from how tight he’s hanging onto the back of the kid’s shirt. Before Shiro can figure out what to say, Coran adds, “If you would like.”

“No,” Keith says, and his voice is ragged and strained again. It’s the most emotion Shiro’s seen from him since they were in the cell, and Shiro doesn’t know if this is good or not, doesn’t know whether he should be glad or not. 

“Right,” Coran says briskly, and that, at least, Shiro can take gratefully. Coran’s already fiddling with the medical scanner, like Keith isn’t obviously on a hair trigger. “Our guest is up next, then.”

Shiro catches the way Keith’s hands spasm, somehow managing to clutch at the kid tighter, and he catches the way kid hangs on tighter to Keith, too. He wants to move, wants to slide forward to sit on the front of his chair, just like Keith; he wants to be able to bolt, but he doesn’t really know where to. To Keith? Or to his own room? Or just out of here, this infirmary-playing-it’s-something-else? Or maybe home. Maybe he just wants to go home. Maybe—

Coran is still leaning forward in his chair, smiling broadly, as he is speaking: “What is—” It’s a delicate pause, something that only lasts a tick or two, “—her name?”

Shiro doesn’t know what Coran is reading in Keith and the kid’s—there must be something there that Coran can see, in the kid’s clothing or body or posture or whatever. All Shiro can read, though, is the pain and fear and rage, all those feelings that make people go crazy.

Keith doesn’t say anything, but he’s looking at Coran; the kid’s paying attention, too, its—her?—ears laid low against her head, but twitching backwards, toward Coran. Shiro swallows and it’s dry and painful, like maybe he’s been gasping for breath as badly as Keith and the kid. (He wonders if Coran is reading him just as much as Coran is reading Keith and the kid; he wonders what Coran sees, and what Allura saw, and what Pidge heard.)

“Number six, then,” Coran says, his voice still brisk and bright, and when he gives orders, Keith obeys them with a slow stiffness that Shiro can only read as resignation.

“Have her sit up a bit more,” Coran says, and, “Turn her a bit, just a little—to her left, I think.”

It feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, the rocks and dirt crumbling beneath his feet. He feels sick with it, like his stomach is being yanked down and out. This might worse than the cell. This must be worse than the cell.

(He thinks that if it was Allura here, sitting in the chair, giving commands, holding the scanner—if it was Allura, he thinks that his arm would already be whirring, burning through the chair arm he’s gripping. If it was Allura—if it was a woman—)

Coran’s leaning forward in his chair, but he’s leaving the couple feet between his chair and Keith’s chair empty. Even his scanner is held back, just barely going past Coran’s knee. Shiro looks away from Keith and the kid, and instead turns his attention to the scanner. It’s trilling again, its little mechanical birdsong loud in the quiet of the room, and there are tiny lights lighting up along its sides. 

Shiro makes himself wonder how it works, makes himself think of sensors types and energy options; batteries—what kind of batteries would be best— Batteries are an innocuous thing, bland and unthreatening; batteries don’t make him think of infirmaries and labs and prison cells. Batteries are something from his life before, when his biggest concerns were finding his keys and charging his phone.

He’s never seen an electric battery here, not on the Castle of Lions or any of the Galran ships or anywhere else. In this stretch of space, no one seems to use electricity; in this stretch of space, energy is something as alien as the people themselves. Here, energy is quintessence and the life of planets and other things Shiro can’t begin to qualify in any real way. 

(He never thought he’d miss electricity.)

A tiny green light is blinking near the top of the scanner now, and Coran is saying, in the same hum-haw manner as earlier, “A few contusions, though nothing very deep. Malnutrition and dehydration—unsurprising.”

And then he says, “Small for her age.”

Shiro can’t stop himself from making a noise. He wants to know, and just as desperately doesn’t want to know. (He shouldn’t wonder. He should think of batteries instead.) Coran looks at Shiro, and he looks like he’s all sympathy; maybe it’s for all three of them, for Keith and the kid and even Shiro. 

“I’d say she’s about six in your planet’s years,” Coran tells them. Coran must understand Shiro better than Shiro does himself, because before Shiro can say that they’re done here—that they have to be done here—Coran nods and says, “Maybe you should go and get them settled, Shiro.”


	3. Chapter 3

This is how they end up sleeping in the same room:

“We can find you a bigger room,” Shiro says, his heart still beating fast and heavy in his chest. They’re only halfway down the hall from the infirmary, and Shiro’s left hand feels cold and numb. The white hallways of the Castle are on the opposite end of the spectrum from the dark gray hallways of Galran ships, but they feel just as alien and cold, just as inhuman. When he feels a shiver coming on, he locks his muscles as best he can and hopes that Keith doesn’t see it.

Keith isn’t really looking at him anyway, at least not head-on. Keith is standing at an angle to Shiro, turned enough that his body is in between Shiro and the Galran kid. The kid is on her feet, standing just behind Keith, and her hands—both of her hands—are wrapped tightly around Keith’s left hand.

“Fine,” Keith says in a low voice, still facing away from Shiro. Shiro hesitates, unsure what fine means: A bigger room is fine? His old room is fine? Or is it fine to just leave Keith and the kid here in the hallway, let them find their own way?

“Keith,” Shiro begins to say, and Keith’s shoulders curl up, like he’s bracing himself for something.

“My room,” Keith interrupts, his shoulders hunched up, his face still turned away, “is fine.”

And Keith just keeps standing there, in the middle of the hallway, a Galran kid clinging to his hand, his face turned stubbornly away from Shiro. Shiro waits for a little while—lasting for maybe all of thirty seconds before he feels a squirming kind of discomfort creeping up and down his spine—then clears his throat and says to Keith, “Right. Let’s go, then?”

It’s not, he tells himself, like leading Keith and the kid on the Galran ship. (That’s a lie.) He doesn’t have to listen to them follow behind him, doesn’t have to fight down the fear that Keith will disappear behind a corner; he doesn’t have to _doubt_. (That’s a lie, too. It’s exactly the same.)

“I can get you some more blankets,” Shiro says as they walk toward the Paladins’ quarters, “and pillows. Clothes, too.”

He sneaks a peek back, just long enough to catch a glimpse of the kid who’s still clinging to Keith like a stuck burr, her body half hidden behind Keith’s. The kid is tiny, her head just barely passing Keith’s waist, and Shiro is pretty sure that even Pidge’s clothes would swallow the kid up. When Shiro lifts his gaze, his eyes meet Keith’s.

There isn’t much more to say. Keith’s room is the same as it was the day he was captured, but Shiro doesn’t know how, or even if, he should say that. Keith knows how many empty rooms there are in the Castle, just like Shiro does; Keith must know, just like Shiro, that there was no sacrifice in leaving his room untouched. Maybe there was hope in leaving Keith’s room untouched, but there was rationality in it, too. Why spend time and resources on an unnecessary task? (Why open that can of emotional worms when you can just close the door and walk away, leaving the ghosts and memories and guilt all locked away together?)

So instead, Shiro offers, “If you need anything,” then trails off into silence when Keith makes no reply.

When they reach Keith’s room, Shiro falls back, hovering a few feet away from the door. Keith moves past Shiro, leaving as much room between them as the width of the hallway will allow; in turn, Shiro curls up his shoulders and leans hard against the wall, keeping his eyes turned down toward the floor. He listens as Keith opens the door to his room: the rasp of Keith’s palm against the lock, the soft whirr of the door sliding open; the way Keith breathes in, some kind of reaction Shiro can’t read properly; footsteps—two sets—growing a little muffled as Keith and the kid enter the room.

After a couple moments, Shiro moves to the other side of the hallway, so that he can peek into Keith’s room from across the width of the hallway. He’s not particularly surprised by what he sees.

Keith is standing in his room, just a couple feet inside the doorway. His back is to Shiro, but Shiro can see the rigidity of his shoulders and spine, the way his right hand is clenched into a fist, and the way his left hand is holding on tightly to the kid’s hands. The kid is pressed up against Keith’s left leg, her shoulder nearly digging into Keith’s thigh, and her ears are laid back. 

Any room, Shiro thinks, can look like a prison cell.

Then Keith’s shoulders loosen, and he moves his left arm in an odd, swinging sort of way. It jostles the kid, just a little, and Shiro can barely hear Keith murmur, “Let’s get cleaned up, ‘kay?”

Keith makes no move to close to the door, or to acknowledge the way Shiro is lurking just a couple feet back in the hallway. Shiro waits, just long enough to see Keith lead the kid into the tiny attached, before he turns and takes himself back down the hall. He’ll go and find Allura, let her know that Keith and the kid are settling in; he’ll ask about clothes that will fit the kid, and extra bedding; he’ll ask about what the kid can and should eat. 

He shoves down all his thoughts about mothers who drown their own kids, and he says, “Right. We’ve got this.”

In the end, he only manages to make it to his own room, one corner and twenty-some-odd yards away. He sinks down onto the edge of his bunk, and the mattress groans beneath the weight of his body and his armor. He wants to lie down—thinks about it desperately, about stripping out of his armor and crawling beneath the blankets, lying his head down onto his pillow and just sleeping. He's weary down to his very bones, and he’s hungry for the chance to close his eyes and rest. 

He makes do with propping his elbows on his knees, resting his head in his hands, and closing his eyes while sitting on the edge of his bed. 

It is enough. It has to be enough. He breathes deeply and evenly, and tries not to think about how dry and itchy and tired his eyes feel. He’ll rest for a few minutes, then he’ll get up and get things done. Just a few minutes—long enough that Keith and the kid can maybe start to relax a little, get a little off edge—and he’ll get back to what needs to be done. 

Shiro feels himself start to slip, a falling sensation that has him jerking sharply enough that his neck and shoulders twinge. He blinks his eyes—still dry and itchy—then rubs them with his left hand. He rubs his eyes one more time, then drags his hand up and over his forehead, pushing his hair off of his sweaty skin.

“Allura,” he says to himself, and he shifts forward, then slides off the edge of his bunk, settling himself on the cold metal floor, his back pressed against the side of his bunk. 

When he sends a request to Allura through the Castle comms, there’s no response. Shiro knows she must be busy, seeing to the Castle and the other Paladins; he knows she must be taking on his responsibilities, too, picking up the slack he’s leaving behind. He licks his lips, then lets his head roll to the side, his left temple coming to rest against the edge of his bunk.

“Keith,” he says in the message he leaves her, “is settling in. We’ll need clothes for the kid. She’s small—I think she comes up to about Pidge’s shoulder. I can get measurements later, if you need.

“Coran’s scans said they’re both malnourished. Hunk will know what Keith can eat, but the kid—I don’t know,” Shiro says, “what her dietary needs are, and I don’t think Hunk will know. If Coran could brief us, that’d be great.”

Shiro closes his eyes again, rolling his head against the side of his bunk. When he continues, he says, “They’re staying in Keith’s room. I think it’d be best if everyone just gave them some room for a while. 

“I’ll tell everyone else later,” he says, “but if you could just give them a heads up, that’d be good.”

And then he pauses, not really sure how to finish the message. What’s too much, and what’s not enough? He can’t make promises, especially when it’s about someone else; he can’t say, _Keith is fine_ , because Keith is really obviously not fine, and he can’t say, _Keith will be fine_ , because even Shiro’s not fine, and Shiro’s been working on the whole _being fine_ thing for a long time now. If Shiro is still this far from being fine, then what the fuck can anyone expect from Keith, only a couple hours free from the Galra?

The real crux of the matter is that they’re in the middle of a war, and Allura is, for all intents and purposes, the general of their entire alliance. If Keith is useful, she needs to use him, and if Keith is useless, she needs to cut him loose. She needs to know what Keith is bringing to them, whether it’s useful or dangerous, and she needs to make an informed, calculated decision. And this—this is where Shiro is necessary. It’s the same reason Shiro was the one tapped to rescue Keith from the prison cell. Shiro knows Keith better than anyone, and Shiro, in the end, has to be the person who can tell Allura whether Keith is an asset or a liability.

He’s not sure what to offer, though, so he says, “I’ll see you at breakfast,” then closes the message. 

He knows it’s a weak closing; he knows that Allura will take note of the long-as-fuck hesitation at the end, the way Shiro skirted any evaluations on how, exactly, Keith is beginning to settle in. He knows that Allura will notice, and that Allura will consider, and that Allura will worry. He knows that Allura will come and question him, in a few hours or maybe even after a day or two; he knows she will come with her face pinched with concern, and he knows that he will have nothing to offer her, because he has nothing to offer himself.

He sighs heavily, then pushes himself up from the floor, clambering to his feet with another heavy sigh. It doesn’t take long to strip himself of his armor and to wipe himself clean of sweat, but it seems to take what energy he had left. He pulls on everyday clothes—trousers and a shirt, an unzipped vest—then sinks back down onto the bed.

He’ll close his eyes, he decides, for a few minutes. Five, maybe ten minutes—long enough to get rid of the fuzziness of his thoughts. He curls up halfway down his bed, pillowing his head on his hand, the blankets bunched beneath him; no pillow, no blankets, day clothes—enough to keep his body and brain from falling into a deep sleep. Just a catnap.

Sleep comes quickly, and it takes him in jerks and starts. He’s hyperaware of time passing—knows that he can’t sleep too long, because he can’t leave Keith alone, not like this—not with the kid. Not on the ship. The Galran ship. He can’t leave Keith alone, not on the Galran ship, because Keith will go back to the cell, and Shiro will lose him—Shiro will turn back, and will see Keith fade away like fog burned away by the sun.

He jerks awake, or he thinks he jerks awake; he breathes heavily, then turns his face into the blankets, forces his shoulders to loosen. Thinks, _I can’t leave Keith alone,_ and thinks, _I have to get Keith back,_ and thinks, _What hallway do I take?_

He is—he thinks—aware that he’s dreaming. At least, sometimes he knows he’s dreaming, because he’s still half-awake. He can feel the weave of the blankets beneath his cheek and his hands; he can feel his room’s lights, the blue-white brightness that’s nearly antithetical to the purple-blackness of Galran ships. But. 

But the way his stomach is rising up with a gut-deep need to _hurry_ feels real, too; the empty feeling of loss, like he’s missing something important, feels real. The fear that he has forgotten—that he has just realized that he forgot—that he is going to forget—

_Fuck_ , he mouths when he wakes up. He wants to say it out loud, but he can’t shake the certainty that if he speaks, he might make his dreams real. He opens his eyes wide, staring at the white wall on the far side of his room, then squeezes his eyes shut. His chest feels like it’s caught in a vise, like his ribs have been wound tighter and tighter until it feels like his heartbeat will make his body shatter from the inside. He’s not sure he’s breathing.

_Fuck_ , he mouths again, and then, because he doesn’t have the time or the privilege to wallow in fear like this, he makes himself say it aloud: “Fuck.”

Nothing happens. His room—white walls and electric-blue lights—stays the same. There’s no other sound, and Shiro breathes in, then exhales loudly, with shaky bravado. 

He doesn’t say it was a dream—that feels too risky, even if he’s certain (or wants to be certain. _My head. My brain_ , Keith had said, and Shiro knows what he meant: _I can’t trust my head. My brain._ Shiro can’t trust his head, or his brain). He can’t say it’s a dream, so instead he says, “Keith is here.

“Keith,” he says to himself, “is here.” Not fine, but here. Not fine, but alive, and that is good enough. That has to be good enough. Shiro will make that be good enough. 

Shiro will be good enough.

Shiro is good enough to get himself up from his bed, and to put himself back together, and to get back to his script.

When he arrives at Keith’s door a couple of minutes later, his arms are filled with blankets and pillows and the closest thing the Alteans have to ace bandages, and his hands are no longer shaking. It, Shiro decides, is a win. It’s an even greater win when he sees that Keith’s door is shut (just like it’s been shut for months now, since Keith was taken by the Galra), and he knocks on the door like a rational, sane person. (His hands are still steady. It’s a win.)

There aren’t any voices from inside the room, but there’s a thumping sound, like something has been dropped, or maybe knocked over. Shiro breathes, counts _one_ and _two_ , and uses his left palm print to override the lock on Keith’s door.

The sight of Keith in the room is nearly enough to make Shiro feel like he’s being bowled over, and he has to lock his knees for a moment, try to steady himself. Keith is here. Keith is sitting on his bed, hunched up, holding one shoe in his hands, a second shoe resting on the floor beside him. And the kid—the Galran kid is sitting back in the bunk, pressed against the wall, and Shiro feels that bowled-over feeling again, and he doesn’t know if it’s relief or anger or fear or hopelessness. 

“I brought some stuff,” Shiro says when his knees feel steadier, and he takes two small steps into Keith’s room, just enough to put him inside the door’s track. He pretends not to notice the way Keith’s hunched shoulders grow more pronounced, or the way the kid seems to sink deeper into the shadows of the bunk. He looks down at the things he’s carrying in his arms instead, making a show of not staring at Keith or the kid. 

“Blankets,” Shiro lists off, “and pillows. Some bandages—ace bandages, for your knee and your wrist. I couldn’t,” he says, shifting the load a little so he can show off the bandages, “find any clothes small enough yet, but that shouldn’t take long.”

He keeps his head ducked, but he looks up with his eyes, glancing toward the bunk. Keith and the kid haven’t moved from their spots, but Keith is beginning to look a little less tense. Shiro wonders if that—the way Keith is putting his shoe down on the floor, opening up his posture and affecting disinterest—is as calculated as Shiro’s own disinterest. It’s like a nature documentary, the type of movie where a narrator blandly describes utterly crazy shit.

_Watch,_ he thinks a little wildly to himself, _as the two dogs pretend that the other is not in the room._ Or maybe, he thinks, the narrator would be saying, _Watch as the feral dog pretends that there is no one else in the room._

“It’s fine,” Keith says in a flat kind of voice. Shiro takes it as permission to look at Keith and the kid a little more closely. 

They’re out of their prison clothes, and while they don’t look healthier, or even better, they at least look more—well, Keith looks more like Keith. He’s in jeans and a t-shirt, with socks on his feet, and the mundanity of socks feels like a punch to Shiro’s gut. He wonders if it felt like a punch to Keith, too, to be able to just put on socks, something so stupid and banal and _small_. Keith’s hair looks damp and frazzled, like he tried to dry it by scrubbing it with a towel, and the collar of his shirt is darker, like it caught water from the ends of Keith’s hair. If it wasn’t for the wanness of Keith’s face and the thinness of his body, he would look like he’s just gotten out of P.E. He looks so close to normal.

Even the kid looks normal, if Shiro ignores the purple skin and giant ears. She’s sitting back in the shadows, but Shiro can see that she’s wearing a shirt that must belong to Keith. It’s a nightshirt, maybe—something that’s probably a little loose on Keith, which means that the kid is practically swimming in it. She’s sitting with her knees hugged up to her chest, the shirt tucked over her kneecaps, and she looks like a human kid, ready for bed, waiting for a bedtime story or something. She looks little, and young, and like she’s supposed to be someone’s little sister.

“Were you able to clean up?” Shiro asks, like it’s not obvious, or maybe like this conversation is just a bunch of nice pleasantries. Keith shrugs, and Shiro smiles and slowly lowers himself to a crouch so he can lay down the things he’s been carrying. He sets the bandages to the side, then sets down the blankets and pillows. Then he shifts a pillow, and says, “Oh.

“I thought,” he says, like it’s an afterthought, “that you might be hungry. It’s not much, just ration bars.” He lifts one of the bars, then sets it to the side, next to the bandages; lifts another ration bar, and looks up at Keith as he holds the bar in his hand. Keith is staring at Shiro now, his mouth a flat, tense line on his face, and Shiro tries to smile. (It feels like an apology.)

“It’s not much,” Shiro says again, “but I thought a snack— Just,” he says, “to tide you over until things get a little more settled.”

The kid is staring at Shiro, too, her eyes gleaming over her kneecaps, her ears turned forward, toward Shiro. Shiro sets the ration bars into a small pile—three, four, five of them—then frowns.

“Keith,” Shiro says slowly, “would it be okay if I slept in here?

“On this side of the room,” Shiro says, “by the door. I can sleep in front of the door, to make sure no one else comes in. 

“But only,” Shiro says, “if it’s okay with you.”

Shiro doesn’t miss the way Keith’s eyes flick back and forth between the ration bars and Shiro, or the way Keith eyes the door, like he’s measuring the distance between the door and the bunk. Shiro doesn’t miss the way guilt pours into his stomach, either, or even the way he ignores it, like it’s a stomach bug he can just power through. Keith might not be able to trust his head, or his brain, but neither can Shiro; Shiro can’t trust Keith’s head or brain—can’t trust that Keith will stay put, or that Keith will stay safe, or that Keith will stay alive. Shiro can’t even trust his own head or brain, not when he’s awake, and definitely not when he’s asleep.

“I want,” Shiro says in a low, low voice, quietly but not so quiet that Keith won’t be able to hear him, “to know that you’re okay.”

He doesn’t have to wait long for Keith’s answer. He’s adjusting the top pillow in the pile of bedding, smoothing out the creases in the pillowcase, when he hears a faint _clack_ , like the sound of teeth snapping together.

When he looks up, Keith is grimacing, but as soon as Keith catches Shiro looking him, his face goes smooth and blank. 

“Do whatever you want,” Keith says in that flat, inflectionless voice, and Shiro ignores the guilt bubbling up in his stomach. He smiles instead, close-mouthed and small, and says as he is rising from his crouch,

“I’ll go and get my things.”


	4. Chapter 4

Shiro sleeps heavily that night. He’d thought that his sleep would be as fitful as his nap a while earlier, but—well, maybe it’s the exhaustion, or maybe it’s being the same room as Keith, or maybe it’s just Shiro’s mind collapsing under its own strain, but Shiro falls asleep quickly, and Shiro sleeps hard. If he wakes up during the night, he’s unaware of it, and if he has any dreams, he forgets them. 

When he wakes the next morning, it’s a slow process; something rouses him, though he can’t say what, and he spends several moments lying on his belly, his head turned to the side, staring at his own left hand—the way his palm is resting flat against his mattress, the way his fingers are loose and just a little curved, the way he can see the faint indents his hand is making in the Altean mattress.

The room is mostly dark, with faint light glowing from each corner of the room. It’s morning, then—the Castle adjusts its lights according to Altean biorhythms, brightening over the course of the morning, then dimming throughout the evening. There’s enough light for Shiro to see the shape of his hand, the strong lines of palm and fingers and knuckles; there’s not enough light, though, to see the details: the tiny scar beneath the first knuckle of his little finger, or the mole that rests in the fleshy bit between his thumb and pointer. The light is dim enough that it casts anonymity over Shiro’s own body, that it lets him stare at his left hand, and consider it like it belongs to someone else.

And he is considering—thinking, _Have my fingers always looked so thin?_ —when there is a rap at the door, someone knocking a one-and-a-two rhythm. Before Shiro can decide who it is, Hunk’s voice says from the other side of the door, “Hey, Keith? I, uh, brought some food. Breakfast. I’ll just, um, leave it out here, so you can eat it whenever. I’ll come back for it later. Like, maybe a couple hours? And I’ll bring lunch. For, uh, you and the, um, the kid—”

That is the point when Shiro opens the door, and the point where Hunk makes a startled, kind of squawking sound, backpedaling a few hasty steps. Shiro reaches out, not quite touching Hunk, but ready to grab him if Hunk stumbles, and Hunk asks, as his back comes to rest against the wall of the hallway, “Shiro?”

“Hunk,” Shiro says in reply, and he smiles at Hunk, turning his hands up a little as he shrugs. “I didn’t meant to startle you.”

“No,” Hunk says over Shiro, like he’s trying to reassure Shiro—like Shiro is the one looking wrong-footed and confused, “it’s fine, I just— Uh, I didn’t know you were here? In Keith’s room? It’s cool, though. Like, totally cool?”

Then Hunk moves, shifting his weight to his left foot and tilting his whole body to the left, obviously trying to see past Shiro. Shiro bites back the desire to shut Keith’s door; he lowers his arms instead, and he closes his hands into loose fists, letting his arms hang at his sides. (The room behind him—Keith’s room—is only dimly lit, and Shiro doubts that Hunk can see anything; Shiro doubts that, even if the room was as brightly lit as the hallway, Hunk could see anything Keith didn’t want him to see. Shiro doubts Keith needs Shiro to close the door for him, even if Shiro wants—wanted? wants—to.)

“They’re still sleeping,” Shiro says gently, because Hunk is always careful with his curiosity, and he deserves to be treated with care in return. (They all deserve to be treated with care; Shiro wishes the universe would treat them with care.) Hunk’s face moves expressively, his eyes widening and his mouth spreading in an embarrassed-looking smile, and his shoulders jerk up.

“Yeah,” Hunk says, almost-but-not-quite a babble, “that makes sense. Of course.” He’s straightening up, looking Shiro straight in the face, and Shiro appreciates that. If it was Lance, he’d probably be shoved up into Shiro’s space, trying to lean over Shiro’s shoulder for a glimpse, and if it was Pidge, she’d probably already be in the room, making herself at home wherever she pleased. Hunk’s care, the delicate, tentative way he approaches each new situation, is so much easier for Shiro to handle, and Shiro is grateful for it.

“I can,” Shiro says, smiling more broadly and more honestly at Hunk, and gesturing towards the covered plate that Hunk is still holding in his hands. Hunk looks down at the plate he’s holding, then shoving it toward Shiro as he says, 

“Yeah, that’d be great. Could you, uh, just let me know if they like it? Or, like, if there’s anything the, um, kid wants to eat?”

“Sure.” Shiro takes the plate, then transfers its weight to his right arm so that he can reach out and clap his left hand on Hunk’s upper arm. “Hunk,” he says, and when Hunk meets his eyes, Shiro says, “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

Hunk leaves a few moments later, after he’s given Shiro a jumble of _You’re welcomes_ and _It’s nothings_ and _Thank yous_. Shiro watches Hunk leave, and once Hunk has turned a corner far down the hallway, Shiro turns himself, and considers Keith’s room.

The door is still open, and Shiro’s mattress is lying just on the other side of the door’s tracks, Shiro’s blanket and sheets and pillow in a rumpled mess from Shiro rushing to open the door when Hunk had knocked. The hallway is brightly lit, and the way its light spills into Keith’s bedroom is eerily similar to the prison from yesterday; like yesterday, there’s an elongated trapezoid of light spilling into the room along the floor, crossing over Shiro’s mattress and stretching deeper into the room. Keith’s room, though, isn’t as dark as the prison; the lights in the corners cast enough light through the room that everything outside the trapezoid of light is a dull, washed-out grey.

Keith himself is a dull, washed-out grey, a fuzzily defined figure sitting in his bunk. Shiro steps into the room—just one step, which leaves him standing on his mattress—and busies himself with closing the door and setting the lights to brighten more quickly. When he looks back across the room, Keith hasn’t seemed to have moved; he’s still a dark, fuzzily lined figure sitting upright in his bunk, turned toward Shiro and the door.

“Are you awake?”

Keith doesn’t answer aloud, but the lights are brightening enough that Shiro sees the way Keith turns his face away and the way Keith’s left shoulder moves in something like a half-hearted, half-meant shrug. 

“Hunk,” Shiro says quietly as he takes one step off his mattress, and one step farther into the room, “brought you both some food.” He bends down to set the covered plate on the floor, at the midpoint between the door and the bunk—the midpoint between Shiro’s bed and Keith’s. When Shiro looks up from the plate, Keith’s face is still turned away, and Shiro can’t tell if Keith had glanced at the plate, or at Shiro. 

“I bet,” Shiro says as he returns to his mattress, settling himself back down onto it with a grunt, “Coran talked to Hunk already—told him what she can eat.”

She—the kid—is nowhere to be easily seen, but there’s a blanketed lump just behind Keith, and Shiro thinks it might have moved at Shiro’s words. Keith’s jaw certainly moved: jutting out, then pulling back in, like even a jutting jaw is too exhausting or too damaging a rebellion for Keith to muster.

“Hunk,” Shiro goes on, finding it easier to speak than to think about what Keith’s jaw might mean, “wants to know if you two like the food, or if there’s anything you’d like to eat in particular.”

“I know.” Keith’s response is quiet, and Shiro doesn’t know if Keith’s voice is gravely because he’s just woken up, or if it’s because the words are such a strain; either way, the voice sounds like it’s shredding something. (It feels like it’s shredding Shiro’s self-control, tearing apart the fragile balance Shiro is clinging to.) “I heard.”

“Oh,” Shiro says stupidly. “Okay.”

Keith looks toward Shiro then, just for one second, maybe two, before he’s turning away, throwing himself flat on his back with huff of breath. Then Keith is rolling over onto his side, turning his back to Shiro and the room at large with startling abruptness. The movement seems so frustrated and so petulant; it seems so _Keith_ , and it has Shiro trapped.

Shiro can’t turn away, can’t move or speak or do anything but watch, waiting for another piece of Keith. He waits a long time—searches for a long time, until Keith’s shirt begins to pull tight across Keith’s back and over Keith’s shoulder, like it’s being tugged from the front. It’s the kid, probably.

It’s the kid completely, because then Shiro hears her whisper, “Keith.”

It’s the first clear thing he’s heard her say. It’s also the only clear thing he hears her say, because Keith moves then. His back and shoulder muscles, defined by the way his shirt is being pulled tight across his back, bunch and shift as he moves his arm, slinging it out in front of him. The kid makes a muffled noise as she’s presumably pulled in close to Keith’s chest, held tight.

Keith, Shiro thinks, is holding her tight to keep her from doing something.

Or, Shiro then thinks, Keith is holding her tight to keep anything from being done to her.

( _Subject,_ Shiro asks himself, _or object?_ The question makes him feel sick.)

“I,” Shiro says, feeling like he may explode with the need to move, and to fix, and to just get the fuck out of there, “think I should go get something to eat.”

He’s clambering up from his mattress as he speaks, clumsy with his conflicting needs. He needs to go to Keith, and he needs to get out of the room; he needs to grab Keith and ask, _What did they do to you?_ He needs to know what was the same and what was different, how and why. He needs to qualify and to quantify.

He needs—wants—needs— _has to_ —understand.

He shoves his mattress out of the way, pushing it along the wall until the doorway is clear. His fingers and hand feel numb, prickling like the circulation’s been cut off, and he fumbles with his blanket as he folds it, then stacks it with his pillow. The mattress, he realizes, is too big; it’s like an elephant in the room, or like a neon sign blasting, _LOOK, SHIRO HAS NO CLUE WHAT HE’S DOING_. Shiro stares down at his mattress, at the folded stack of blanket and pillow, and it feels like his mattress is staring accusingly back at him. 

He opens his mouth, meaning to ask if he should move his mattress from the room, but what he manages to say—all he manages to say—is, “Keith.”

And, christ, he can hear how broken his own voice is. Shiro closes his eyes, squeezing them until he can see starbursts blooming inside his lids. When he’s brave enough to open his eyes, it takes a few seconds for his eyes to clear enough that he can see. It doesn’t matter, though; Keith is still lying on his bed, his back turned to Shiro, his shoulders tense and drawn. Nothing has changed.

(Everything has changed. Everything has changed, ever since the Garrison said, _Congratulations, you’ve been selected for Kerberos._ )

“Keith,” Shiro repeats, then he slams his mouth shut, his teeth clacking together painfully. This isn’t what anyone needs. What they need is normality and stability, a chance to breathe and pull themselves together. Shiro needs to pull himself together.

He pulls in a breath, then says again, “I should go get something to eat. Just leave your plate outside when you’re done—we can take care of it.”

He doesn’t stumble when he leaves the room, but his hand feels numb and it looks like it’s shaking when he touches the door lock, shutting Keith’s door. Then, when he hears the hiss of the door sealing shut, he feels his knees begin to give, and he turns so that he can slide down the wall in a controlled fall.

Shiro lets himself fold up, like he’s folding up the misery in his body, tucking it in closer to his chest. He folds his arms over his legs, and he lies his head in the cross of his arms; and even like this, he can feel the difference in his metal right arm and his flesh left arm; even like this, he can feel the difference between then and now.

“Christ,” he whispers, sitting outside Keith’s room, like a kid who’s been sent to the hallway as punishment, “how do I fix this?”

x

Generally speaking, Shiro doesn’t really know a lot about mental health. 

He knows that he’s been through some traumatic stuff, and he knows that his mental health is suffering from it. He also knows that he can and will power through, because there aren’t really any other options. He’s stranded god knows how many billions of miles from home, leading a handful of teenagers in a war against an empire that existed thousands of years before humans could even write shit down. None of this is what he was trained to do, or to deal with, but he doesn’t have a choice. He just has to deal.

That’s easier said than done, though, especially when it’s coming to the mental health of everyone else. Especially Keith. Especially Keith and the Galran kid who are now Shiro’s responsibility. 

The Galaxy Garrison isn’t a military academy. If kids want to be trained for warfare, and all the things that go with it, they go somewhere else. The Garrison is a space prep school. There’s overlap: learning to follow commands, learning to problem-solve, learning how to work in concert with others. The specifics, though, are different. The Garrison teaches its students how to deal with being alone, or being stuck with three other people for years at a time; it doesn’t teach its students how to deal with being a prisoner of war, or being tortured by aliens. 

Shiro knows what he’s supposed to do to keep everyone on the team feeling necessary and important, to maintain a balance of individualism and group cohesion; he knows how to deal with homesickness and mental exhaustion from flying through space for months at a time.

He doesn’t know how to fix someone who’s been held by an enemy state. It’s just one more glaring oversight of prep school curriculum: give the students a dozen courses on advanced physics, and zero classes on counseling survivors of alien contact and warfare.

The whole situation is playing havoc with Shiro’s control issues, too. 

He can’t read this no-longer-Keith, and he doesn’t know how his words and actions will set Keith off. It’s like he’s walking blind, trying to navigate with the memories of a place that no longer exists. Everything’s been shifted around, and each step has Shiro stumbling over something new and wrong: Keith’s silence, and Keith’s fear, and Keith’s general not-Keith-ness. It’s like Shiro’s walking through the aftermath of a storm, but all the lights have gone out; he’s stubbing his toes and stepping on glass, and pretty soon he’s probably going to walk right off a fucking cliff.

And he can feel himself losing grasp of his own control, too. 

This is all a disaster and a tragedy, and he has no idea how to fix it—and god, he needs to fix it. 

He needs to fix something, and if Shiro is honest with himself, it’s that—the need to fix something—that sends him wandering through the Castle on the second day Keith is home.

He works his way through the Castle and its inhabitants methodically:

He finds Hunk first, tangled up in a knot of wires and cables. Hunk looks single-minded in his task, and when Shiro sits beside him, Hunk only spares Shiro a brief glance before he doubles back down on his task. 

Shiro watches Hunk for a little while, long enough that Shiro’s ankles and feet begin to fall asleep and he has to stretch his legs out. When one of the wires sparks, causing Hunk to hiss and shove his thumb into his mouth, Shiro mildly asks, “Burn?”

“Yeah,” Hunk mumbles around his thumb. When he pulls it out of his mouth to inspect it, Shiro leans forward to inspect it, too. It’s a small burn, and nothing that seems serious; a little patch of raised, pink skin on the side of Hunk’s thumb. 

“You should put it under running water,” Shiro offers, and Hunk makes an agreeing kind of noise. He doesn’t move from his spot, though, or push the cables and wires off of his lap. Instead, he inspects his thumb once more, then goes back to work, stripping and unbraiding the cables to bare wires.

Shiro watches as Hunk twists together wires from separate cables, creating a strange, complicated web of interconnecting wires and cables out of the individual pieces. 

“What are you doing?” Shiro asks after another little while. 

Hunk grunts a _huh_ kind of sound, then lifts up one of his newly joined wires. “Nothing much,” he says. “I’m just trying to join these wires. It’s not for anything important, but Pidge and I were talking about that game system she bought, way back when, and I was wondering—I thought maybe I could splice some cables together, figure out how to hook the system up to the Castle.”

Hunk smiles at Shiro, looking good natured, and he gestures at the wall: “There’re so many screens,” he says to Shiro. “There has to be one we can use for that stupid game.”

Shiro laughs, then says, “Yeah, that’d be great. Let me know if it works out.”

Then Shiro asks aloud, directing the question to both himself and to Hunk, “Do you think Alteans had video games? I mean, their AI is incredible, and their virtual reality. It can’t be that different.”

They talk about Hunk’s project for a little while longer, and about video games they used to play when they were kids. They talk about the video games that were supposed to come out, that have probably been released back home on earth. They talk about the other things they’re missing, too. Not the big things, like their families or their homes, but the little things, like the third movie in that one series, or the new seasons of that weird mockumentary about the Mars colony. They talk about the little things that hurt, too, just in a lesser, different kind of way. 

When Shiro is sighing, having rhapsodized about his favorite band and bemoaned the tours he’s missed in the past few years, Hunk asks, “How is he?”

 _He_ means Keith.

Shiro straightens up a little, rolling back his shoulders as he says, “As well as can be expected.

“They had him,” Shiro says, “for a long time. It’s going to take him a while to—” _To what? To feel safe? To trust them again?_ “—to feel at home,” Shiro says. “He just needs some time, and a little space.”

Hunk nods and says, “Yeah, I figured. Same with the kid, right?”

Shiro nods, hoping that he’s not lying, and says, “Yeah, same with the kid.”

They don’t say much more about Keith or about the kid. Shiro apologizes and says that Keith and the kid hadn’t eaten before he left, and Hunk shrugs and says that it’s no big deal; “I’ll try out a couple different things,” Hunk says.

And when Hunk burns his thumb again, and is sucking on the burn piteously, Shiro leaves, continuing on his way.

x

Lance and Coran are up on the deck, flipping through star charts on the monitors. Coran is explaining something that sounds suspiciously like a cross between the birth of stars and the birth of weblums. Whatever it is that he’s explaining seems to make sense to Lance, who’s nodding and making _uh-huh, uh-huh_ noises. Shiro clears his throat, and when both Lance and Coran look up at him, he enters the room, crossing the deck so that he can peer over their shoulders at the monitors that Coran is manipulating. 

“Hey, Shiro,” Lance says brightly.

Shiro wonders if the brightness of Lance’s tone is from a general brightness of disposition today, or if it’s due to whatever random brand of esoteric knowledge Coran is currently dropping. Either way, it’s comforting to know that Lance isn’t wallowing in the depths of despair.

(The depths of despair. Shiro remembers the Anne of Green Gables books vividly. His mom had loved them—still loves them, probably—and she’d dragged the whole family up to visit PEI during Shiro’s first year of middle school. Their home had been something close to a verbatim of Anne Shirley. 

_I’m in the depths of despair,_ his mom would sigh whenever Shiro’s dad texted to say he’d be home late.

 _My bosom companion,_ she would exclaim when she picked Shiro and his sister up from school.

And whenever Shiro or his sister would have fights with their friends, their whole family would gather at the dinner table and murmur darkly, _You can’t trust those fair-weather friends._

Life in his house was a long list of literary references; jokes his mom and dad would shoot over the kids’ heads with giggles and winks, saying, _As you wish_ and _There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in the world._

Anne of Green Gable. Princess Bride. Northanger Abbey. A dozen more young women who lived fantastical lives in both mundane and fantastical worlds. Right now, Shiro thinks that his mom would understand very well if he was home, and he could sink to the floor and rest his head in her lap and cry, _I am in the depths of despair._

He thinks that if he was home, that she would comb her fingers through his hair and lay kisses on his face, and she would say, _I know, sweetheart. I know._

She always understood.)

So Lance doesn’t seem to be in the depths of despair, and that can only be a good thing, especially considering the fact that Shiro feels like he himself is currently tottering on the edge of the depths of despair. He smiles at Lance and Coran, and he nods as Lance babbles something that sounds very similar to the snatches of _birth of stars_ and _birth of weblumbs_ that Shiro had caught from the doorway. The words don’t seem to make any more sense now than they did then, but Shiro nods along and makes the appropriate, appreciative sounds. 

If nothing else, Shiro knows how to make his team feel heard and valued. 

When Lance has finished his explanation, with only a few corrective interruptions by Coran, Shiro says, “Sounds interesting.”

(It’s not a lie.)

(Not entirely, at least.)

“Anyway,” Lance chirps, “what’s up? You need something, Team Leader?”

Shiro shrugs, then rests his right hand on the back of the seat closest to them, leaning his weight on it. He thinks the pose looks relaxed. He hopes the pose looks relaxed. “Just going around,” he says, “checking how everyone’s doing.”

He doesn’t add, _Because I didn’t yesterday,_ or _Because I was a fucking disaster last night_ , or _Because I think I’m losing my mind and falling into the depths of despair._

Maybe Lance reads between Shiro’s lines, though, because Lance says, “Hey, it’s cool, no worries. Everything seemed to go pretty well. I mean—” And now Lance is beginning to look a little less blissed out. As Shiro watches, Lance’s face seems to begin to crease inwards, his eyebrows pulling in and down and his mouth beginning to pucker. “I mean,” Lance says, “it seemed like everything was going okay. We got Keith back.”

There is an awkward beat of silence, and then Coran says, “And Number Six, too.”

Shiro’s laugh feels more like a choke than anything else, but he gives it a good college try, then says, “Yeah, it went alright.”

And really, in the grand scheme of things, it did go alright. No one’s dead, and no one seems to be physically maimed. God knows what Keith’s actual mental state is, and god knows what’s going on in the head of Keith’s little Galran, but in the grand scheme of things—and on the surface level at least—everything went alright.

Shiro says, “We got him home, and that’s the most important thing.”

Then, when Lance is saying, “Yeah, it really is,” Shiro adds:

“I just wanted to let you know that they’re settling in. I think we should give them some time and maybe a little bit of space.”

And then—because Lance has a great tendency to let exuberance do the majority of his spontaneous thinking—Shiro spells it out a little more clearly: “They’re in Keith’s room, and I’d prefer it if you just kept your distance from it for a little while. Just give them time to get settled in.”

“Yeah, sure,” Lance says. “Let them acclimate themselves? I can do that. They won’t even know I’m here. In the Castle.” Lance makes a strange motion with his hands, lifting them up, then lifting up a knee. 

It takes Shiro a moment to recognize it, and to think, _Oh, right. Like Daniel-san._

“Like a ninja,” Lance says, and Shiro holds his tongue about the crossed references. 

“Like a ninja,” Shiro repeats instead, and he clasps Lance’s arm just like he clasped Hunk’s arm this morning. “That’ll be perfect, Lance. Thank you.”

That seems to be the end of Lance’s interest in the topic. Shiro thinks it’s less that Lance is uninterested, and more that Lance is trying to make a point of the fact that he can—and will—give Keith whatever space and time Keith may need. (Lance, Shiro knows, has grown during the past few years. They’ve all grown. Pidge is confident in her abilities, and Hunk is steadier in his nerves, and Lance can read between the lines and follow Shiro’s orders in a way he couldn’t when they were first dragged from Earth.) The avidness with which Lance returns to the topic of stars and weblums and now something about time particles—what the fuck are time particles?—must have a lot to do with Lance’s desire to silently reassure Shiro.

Shiro sticks around for a couple minutes, but it must seem like he’s looming over them, because Coran turns in the middle of a soliloquy on the beautiful fluctuation of time particles over light waves and says, “Though maybe you should be finding Allura. I believe she said she’d be finding clothes for Number Six today.”

Coran’s tone is politely pushy, and Shiro mildly agrees, “Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Great,” Coran says loudly. “I imagine she is in her bedroom, or somewhere nearby. That was her family’s wing, after all.”

“I’ll find her,” Shiro assures him, and when Coran pointedly turns his attention back to the monitor, picking up his time-particle refrain with, _But the crescendo over the waves_ , Shiro beats a hasty retreat. 

Allura isn’t in her bedroom, but she’s in a room only a few doors down. The room’s door is open, and Shiro can hear the sound of Allura speaking to her mice from down the hall. He shortens his stride and lets his feet fall more heavily onto the floor, announcing his presence with heavy footsteps. When he reaches the open door, Allura is looking up toward him.

She’s sitting in the middle of the room, and she looks like a picture of one of those fantastical girls in fantastical worlds. Her skirts are spread around her, puddling over her lap and onto the floor, and her hair is hanging in loose, fat curls over her shoulders and down her back. There are piles of fabric in her lap and to either side of her: shimmery fabrics in brilliant hues, and pale gauzy things, and fabrics that look like they’ve been inlaid with diamonds, or maybe with stars. Maybe—before their world collapsed—the Alteans knew how to pull stars down from the sky and bind them into every day life. What a magical concept.

Allura is holding up what looks like a very small dress, something that a two- or three-year-old could wear. She lowers it to her lap, tucking it amongst the other fabrics, and she says, “Oh, Shiro. I was just looking for some clothes.”

“Coran told me,” Shiro tells her, and when Allura shifts to her right, clearing a space on her left side, Shiro comes into the room and sits beside her.

“They’re beautiful,” he says; when she smiles at him, he reaches out and touches one of the pieces. When he holds it up, he sees it’s another dress. It’s a gauzy thing, full of flounces, and when he shakes it out, he sees that it’s a little dress made up of layers of light, airy fabric. The collar is a pale, washed-out yellow, and the color deepens as it falls down the dress, until it reaches a saturated eggplant at the hem. It is, he can say, utterly gorgeous, and he thinks that his sister would be having fits over it if she was here.

It looks fit for a princess. 

He shakes it out again, watching the way the flounces lift and settle, and he asks, “Was it yours?”

Allura hums a _mhmm_ , and she reaches out, taking the dress from Shiro’s hands. She spreads it over her knees, on top of the other fabrics, and then fingers the trim on one of the cap sleeves. 

“My mother had a matching one,” she says, and Shiro watches as she folds the dress over. There’s a little line of buttons marching up the back of the dress, tiny things that look like pearls, and Allura drags her finger down the line of buttons, tapping her fingernail against each one. “I think it was a birthday dress. I must have been six, or maybe seven.”

Shiro looks at all the piles of fabric surrounding Allura, and he says, “The colors are incredible.”

Allura laughs, then says, sounding embarrassed, “I may have been a little spoiled.”

“You were a princess,” Shiro points out, and Allura laughs again, saying, “Yes, I was.”

“You still are,” Shiro adds, and Allura says, “Yes, I am.”

She sighs then, and when Shiro glances up at her face, she is no longer smiling. “Well,” she says, “I don’t think any of this will be useful. They’re pretty, but not very practical.”

Shiro watches as she folds the gauzy dress, then sets it to the side and picks up another dress, shaking it out. It looks like satan, and it’s a deep green, covered with pale, silver embroidery. When Shiro squints, he thinks he can see the patterns in the embroidery: loops and swirls that converge into intricate knots, then spread apart again. It’s like the wires Hunk was braiding together an hour or so ago. 

“She may like pretty things,” he offers, and Allura says, “Yes, of course, but these—”

She sighs again, then pushes the pile of fabric on her lap off to the side. “Not these ones,” she says firmly, and she rises gracefully to her feet, shaking her hair back over her shoulders and slapping her hands at her skirts, righting the fall of the fabric. 

“There are plenty of clothes for children in the Castle,” she continues in her firm tone. “It will just take a little while to find them. Besides,” she adds, holding out her hand toward Shiro. When Shiro reaches out, grasping Allura’s hand, Allura tugs, easily pulling Shiro up onto his feet. “I’m sure she would like a wider selection than birthday dresses.”


	5. Chapter 5

It takes the longest to find Pidge. Shiro scours the Castle, checking Pidge’s most likely haunts, but each place turns up empty. She’s not in the hanger, and she’s not in the kitchen where she sometimes keeps Hunk company. She’s not in the lounge with its sunken seats, and she’s not in any of her technical hideaways—the corners of computers and powerbanks and cables that seem to sprout up every time Shiro turns his back. He’s mostly given up on finding her when he very nearly stumbles into her.

He’s just a few hallways away from Keith’s room, and when he turns a corner, he finds himself stepping straight into Pidge’s path. She squawks, a surprised, parrot-like sound, and Shiro grabs her right arm with his left hand as he reaches for the wall with his right hand, trying to steady both Pidge and himself. 

“Dude,” Pidge says, staring up at him with her eyes looking wide and stunned behind her glasses. “You’re like a freaking ninja, I didn’t even hear you.”

“I could say the same,” Shiro replies, and as Pidge chuckles, Shiro idly says, “Maybe we should give Lance some lessons.”

It works the way he hoped it would: Lance’s name catches Pidge’s attention. Pidge is a curious person. Shiro thinks that, out of most everyone he knows, Pidge may be the one most like the proverbial cat; her curiosity is something magnificent—if distressing—to behold. Whenever there’s something new—whenever there’s something that Pidge doesn’t understand in its entirety—she chases it relentlessly, hunting down every scrap of information: why and how and who and when and where.

“What?” is what she asks now as she frowns up at Shiro, like she’s caught between being disgruntled that Shiro knows something she doesn’t and thrilled that there’s something new for her to discover.

“Lance,” Shiro says, a little surprised at how amused he feels to be telling her this, “said he’s going to be putting his ninja skills to use.” He tells her briefly about the day’s conversations, about keeping Hunk company as Hunk tried to figure out how to connect Pidge’s game system to the Castle, and about his bafflement over Coran’s time particles and light waves, the birth of stars and weblums. He says that he spoke to Allura about finding the kid some clothes, and he tells Pidge about Lance’s promise to be like a ninja, neither seen nor heard while giving Keith and the kid all the space and time they may need.

“Huh,” is what Pidge says in return. She looks a little doubtful, and Shiro feels his grin widen against his own will.

“I guess we’ll see how Lance does,” he says, and he’s thrilled to see Pidge’s face clear as she begins to laugh.

“It’ll either be amazing,” she says, “or it will be a complete disaster.”

Shiro snorts and says, “It won’t be the only disaster we’ve had around here.”

He regrets the words as soon as he says them. He’d meant the words as a joke, and everyone’s certainly had more than their fair share of disasters that they can laugh about, from kitchen mishaps and misplaced boots, to magical space lions that sulk like overly-tired toddlers. The problem is that they’ve had more than their fair share of disasters that they can’t laugh at: planets that have been decimated while under their watch and battles that end in utter defeat; kids who disappear between one minute and the next, lost for months because Shiro looked away for just a second in the middle of a skirmish.

It’s like the stories you hear about kids who are lost in a mall, who disappear because their mom or their dad or their older sibling looks away for just a moment. There aren’t milk cartons here, or missing posters, but Shiro felt each day that Keith was gone like the image of Keith’s face and the date he went missing were stamped in Shiro’s brain, so deep down that it became something integral to him.

“Well,” Pidge says after a few moments of silence; her voice is bone dry. “That got dark pretty fast, didn’t it?”

Shiro snorts again, but this time it is entirely self-deprecating. Trust him to bring down the mood in the fraction of a second. 

Before Shiro can apologize, though, Pidge says, “I went to see them.”

She doesn’t blurt it out, because blurting things out is the kind of thing you do when you’re admitting a wrong doing, when you’re seeking forgiveness for something. Pidge doesn’t really do that. She states things as matter of fact, indifferent to outside views of right and wrong and forgiveness or punishment. When she says, _I went to see them_ , she’s just informing Shiro of the fact; she’s not asking for his forgiveness, or asking for his blessing, or asking for anything at all, because Pidge doesn’t ask very much. She does, and she takes, and she _is_.

“Oh,” Shiro says a little weakly. Pidge is lifting her eyebrows as she looks up at him, and she shrugs as Shiro asks her, “Why?”

“I was walking down the hall, and I saw an empty plate outside Keith’s room, so I thought I’d see how they were. I knocked,” she says, “but Keith didn’t answer, so I gave him full warning, then opened the door.”

“Oh,” Shiro says again, just as weakly as before. Pidge is unrepentant in her bluntness, and blatantly unconcerned with Shiro’s reactions to the story she is recounting:

“I just poked my head in.” The _just_ isn’t her trying to lessen her actions or excuse things away. It’s a descriptor: it was _just_ her head this time; it probably won’t be _just_ her head next time. “Just to check on them.”

“And?” Shiro asks, his voice still weak, even to his own ears. 

Pidge shrugs and says, “They were there. They seemed fine. I couldn’t see the kid, but I think she was sleeping. Keith—I think I woke up Keith.” Now, with these words, she looks a little embarrassed, and maybe even a little ashamed. It is very Pidge: unconcerned in what people think of her, but concerned in how she affects others. She reminds Shiro so much of Keith-that-was.

Shiro shifts on his feet, moving his weight from his left foot to his right, then back to his left, and he considers what he wants to say.

Pidge is a lot like Hunk, too. She catches things, the little signs and tells that everyone has, and she can be patient when she wants to be. Apparently, she wants to be patient now, because she waits and waits and waits as Shiro struggles with what he wants to say. When he finally spits out the words, it is to tell her, “I think I made a mistake.”

“Okay,” Pidge says slowly, and Shiro grimaces, then lifts up his right hand to pinch the bridge of his nose with his metal thumb and forefinger. 

“Less ‘I think’,” he corrects himself, “and more ‘I know’. 

“I wanted them to be comfortable, but I wasn’t really sure how—” He’s still pinching the bridge of his nose, because it gives him an excuse to keep his eyes closed, so that he won’t have to see Pidge looking up at him. Pidge may not seek out forgiveness or understanding, but Shiro does. Shiro can’t stop himself from doing it, but as much as he wants it—as much as he needs it—he can’t watch other people’s faces while he recounts any of his innumerable fuck-ups. 

“I think I may have ruined any chance of getting Keith to trust me again,” he continues in a low voice. 

There are false nerves laid beneath the metal of his Galran arm, an incomprehensible union of science and magic, and it means that Shiro can feel touch on his arm—similar but still alien from the sense of touch on his flesh arm. When Pidge grabs his right elbow, he feels it: the slide of her fingers across the metal plates, the pressure as she tightens her grip and tugs down. It almost feels real, and maybe that’s one of the things that frightens him the most about this arm of his—about everything else the Galra have given him: all these things that feel real enough in his head that he can’t determine if they’re reality or if they’re a waking fever-dream. 

( _My head_ , Keith had said, and Shiro had understood exactly what Keith had meant, because Shiro is constantly fighting a war of real and not real in his own head.)

Shiro lets Pidge tug his arm down, and when his finger and thumb have left the bridge of his nose, he opens his eyes and meets hers. 

“Shiro,” Pidge asks him, her voice as firm and no-nonsense as Allura’s, “what did you do?”

Shiro sighs, then says, “I don’t know what I was thinking.” (This is a lie. He knows exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking, _I can’t lose him again._ ) “I didn’t think I could sleep in my own room, and I was worried about what would happen if they were left alone.”

“So you slept in his room,” Pidge interjects. “I already knew that. Everyone knows that, Hunk told us at breakfast.”

“That’s not—” Shiro pauses, and thinks, and asks, “Did Coran tell you about their scans?”

Pidge frowns and makes a noncommittal motion, tilting her head to the side for a moment before she straightens it. Shiro says, “They’re malnourished. That’s what you do to prisoners, right? You keep them hungry, you keep them weak.” (It’s what they did to him, and sometimes Shiro thinks he can still feel the hunger in his belly, no matter how much or how recently he’s eaten.)

“Okay,” Pidge says slowly. Shiro thinks she might be seeing where he’s going with this.

He says, “I offered them some energy bars, then I asked if I could stay in the room. It doesn’t really matter,” he says before Pidge can reply, “what I meant. What really matters is what Keith thinks I meant.”

“Which is that you were bribing him.” Pidge is as blunt now as she was earlier, and Shiro says, before he gently tugs his elbow out of Pidge’s grip, lifting his hand so he can pinch the bridge of his nose again,

“Pretty much. Like I was trying to bribe a dog.”

When he finally lowers his hand and opens his eyes again, Pidge is scowling, her head turned so that her scowl is directed at nothing in particular. That might make it a little bit worse: Shiro is pretty sure he deserves her scowl, and he thinks it’d be nicer to get it than to have any of this thoughtful compassion from Pidge’s side. 

“So you fucked up.” Pidge crosses her arms over her chest, and between the sharp lines of her crossed arms and deceptive breadth of her rolled back shoulders, she looks more formidable than might be expected from someone so tiny. “That just means you need to do better.

“Shiro,” she says, “you’re his best friend. I mean, honestly, if we weren’t stuck out here, however many billion lightyears from home, you’d be his only friend. The rest of us,” she motions in the vague direction of the bulk of the Castle, where presumedly Hunk and Lance and Allura and Coran are going about their daily lives, “our friendship with Keith is circumstantial. We’re friends because we’re stuck here together, and we’re friends because it’s either be friends or go crazy and try to kill each other.

“You were friends with him before all of this, though, so.” She ends the _so_ with determined abruptness. She breaths in and out; Shiro can’t look away. “Do better. Tell him you fucked up and apologize, and then just—” She shrugs and says it again, though this time her voice isn’t as firm and determined as before; now, Shiro thinks he can detect a waver of uncertainty in her voice. Maybe she’s as scared of fucking up as he is. “Do better.”

x

The second night isn’t like the first, and the differences begin with the lights:

Shiro returns to Keith’s room hours after dinner, when the Castle is beginning to go to lights out. He knocks on Keith’s door and when, like the night before, Keith doesn’t answer—or at least doesn’t answer audibly—Shiro opens the door himself. 

Keith and the kid are lying on the bed. Shiro can see the tips of the kid’s ears from over Keith’s shoulder, and Keith himself is lying on his side, like he was this morning, his back turned to the room at large. Shiro doesn’t enter the room at first; he pauses in the doorway, resting his metal hand against the doorframe.

“Do you mind,” he asks Keith, “if I sleep here again? Tonight?”

He watches Keith’s form intently, searching out any sign of a shrug. There’s no visible movement that offers a visible answer. When Shiro prompts, “Keith?” Keith makes a low, almost grunting kind of sound, then says,

“Whatever you want.”

That is like the night before, too. Shiro says, “Okay,” and begins to prepare himself for bed.

He’d scooted the mattress along the wall when he’d left earlier this morning, and he grabs his mattress now, pulling it back in front of the door. His blanket and pillow are still folded and stacked neatly on top of his mattress, and he shakes them out, fluffing the pillow as much as he can (Altean pillows are nothing like Earth pillows; they’re strangely spongey and dense, a material doesn’t fluff well at all) and snapping out the blanket so that it covers the breadth and length of the mattress.

He’s already dressed for bed: he’d stopped by his room before he’d come here, and he’d changed his day clothes for pajamas; he’d washed his face and brushed his teeth; he’d told himself that it wasn’t an expectation or anticipation. (Maybe it was just hopefulness.)

He looks over toward Keith and the kid again, then asks them, “Should I turn off the night now?”

Keith moves then, rolling over onto his back just enough that he can look across the room toward Shiro. Shiro finds himself meeting Keith’s eyes, not sure what Keith is looking for and not sure what he should try to show Keith. He tries to smile—he thinks he’s smiling—but he thinks that isn’t what Keith’s really looking for, because Keith frowns, then turns his face away.

He doesn’t his back on Shiro, though. Instead, Keith settles more firmly onto his back and stares pointedly up at the low ceiling of his bunk. “Leave the light on,” Keith says.

And, a moment or two later, Keith adds an awkward sounding, “Please.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, stumbling over his words in his haste to appease Keith, to make sure that Keith knows he’s being listened to, that Shiro will do anything—almost anything—that Keith wants. “That’s fine. I’ll just— I’ll leave it on.”

He lays himself down on his mattress then, tugging the blanket over himself. It feels uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable the night before, sleeping in Keith’s room, but this—tonight—feels stranger. Maybe it’s because the lights are on.

Shiro feels like every noise he makes is amplified, like each time he shifts on his mattress, turning from his back to his side, and from his side to his stomach, and from his stomach back to his side again, he’s as loud as a herd of elephants, or something else equally loud and disruptive. Maybe it’s the lights, too, that make it so hard for him to fall asleep. He throws his arm over his eyes, trying to hide from the room’s lights; then he rolls back onto his stomach, shoving his face into his pillow. The pillow, though, Altean and spongey and heavy, makes it feel like he’s suffocating himself, and he has to roll his head to the side that he can breathe again—but that just means that the light can reach his eyes again, too. 

There is something different tonight. The lights, maybe. Or maybe it’s the fact that Shiro isn’t as bone-achingly exhausted as he was the night before. This time—tonight—he can feel sleep like it’s something just out of reach.

He closes his eyes, trying to be decisive about it; he won’t open them again, not until he’s waking up. He’ll keep his eyes closed until his brain gives up and lets him fall asleep. If he doesn’t have any other options—if he’s single-minded about it—then he’ll fall asleep. If he keeps his eyes closed, and he counts steadily, and he refuses any other outcome, then he’ll fall asleep. Eventually, he’ll fall asleep. Eventually, he will sleep. Eventually—

When he wakes up, his mind is displaced.

The room is brightly lit, and for a moment he thinks he’s overslept, that he’s late for a test. A test?

No. This isn’t the Garrison, and this isn’t—

He blinks, staring up at the white walls and ceiling, overlaid with the blue, lit glow of the lights. It’s the Castle. This is the Castle. And the crying that he hears isn’t his roommate from the Garrison. It’s the kid, the little kid that Keith has. The little kid that Shiro found in the Galran prison.

Shiro blinks again, then rubs his eyes as he rolls over onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow enough that he can look over at Keith’s bunk.

Keith isn’t in his bunk. He’s crouched on the floor next to his bunk, and he’s got one hand resting on the kid’s knee. He’s whispering something to the kid, speaking fast enough and low enough that Shiro can’t catch anything Keith is saying. The kid is sitting on the bunk, close to the edge, and she’s rubbing her face as she cries, her ears pressed down flat against her head. 

It’s a miserable looking picture, Keith trying to comfort the kid and the kid crying too hard to be comforted.

Shiro props himself up higher, then asks, “What is it? What happened?”

Keith goes silent immediately, and he rises up a little from his crouch, turning enough to stare straight at the far wall that runs between the bunk and the doorway where Shiro has been sleeping. 

“It was an accident,” Keith says, his voice that flat, emotionless tone it’s been most every time he’s said anything in regards to the kid.

The kid is still crying, but now her crying is full of hiccups, like she’s trying to muffle herself and is only making herself worse for the effort. Her hands, which were rubbing her face, are now covering her mouth, and she’s cowering down in a way that makes the picture even more miserable. 

Shiro pushes himself all the way up, so that he’s sitting cross-legged on his mattress, and he breathes slowly. 

There’s a sour smell in the room. It’s not overpowering, but it’s new, and it’s heavy enough that Shiro thinks it must be fresh. Shiro breathes in again, through his nose, then begins to fuzzily put the pieces together: the kid’s crying, the way Keith is crouched beside the bed, the sour smell in the room, and even the blankets on Keith’s bed, torn apart and piled together.

“Did she,” Shiro asks slowly, feeling out the question with each word, “wet the bed?”

The next hiccuping cry the kid makes sounds almost like a tiny wail, and Keith repeats, “It was an accident.”

“Okay,” Shiro says. He pushes his hands into his hair, scratching at his scalp, then rubs his eyes again. “Okay. That’s fine, just— Is she sick?” Shiro asks, and when Keith painfully, obviously hesitates, Shiro realizes that Keith is trying to decide whether he should lie.

Here’s a thing: As a rule, Keith doesn’t lie. Rules are broken all the time, but as it stands, Keith doesn’t lie. Shiro knows that Keith doesn’t lie, because Shiro spent years watching Keith move his way through the Garrison, blunt and point-blank, turning honesty into an actual, fucking fault. Keith doesn’t back down, and Keith doesn’t compromise, and Keith doesn’t lie—not unless it’s for someone else.

(Shiro had asked him about it, back at the Garrison. Keith had got one too many demerits: out past curfew, or unauthorized movement, or disorderly conduct, or any one of the other infractions that he seemed to accumulate like he was trying for a prize. The result had been breathtaking, in a manner of speaking—Keith sullenly doing pushups while three instructors yelled at him, on and on and on until Shiro was exhausted just by watching from across the field. 

Afterwards, when Keith had been lying on the grass, red-faced and sweaty, Shiro had dropped down to sit next to him, and had asked, _Why didn’t you just lie? Nichols wouldn’t have known._

Keith had breathed out loudly, almost like he was blowing a raspberry, and had said, _Lying’s stupid._

And, when Shiro had said something about how stupid it was to do pushups when he didn’t need to, Keith had said, _The Sisters didn’t get mad at us when we did stupid shit. They just got mad when we lied about it._

 _The Sisters said,_ Keith had said, and he’d looked Shiro straight in the face then, like he really believed in what he was saying, _that lying was disrespectful to everyone. It is, Shiro. I’m not going to lie and act like everyone else is stupid enough to believe it._ )

At the end of the hesitation, Keith says, “She’s not sick.”

Shiro doesn’t know if this is the lie or if this is the truth. Keith, as a rule, may not lie, but the few times he does lie, he does so well, and each lie that Keith tells is rare enough that Shiro doesn’t really know what tells Keith may have. Shiro doesn’t really want to take Keith’s word for it, but he doesn’t want to disbelieve Keith, either.

“You should help her get cleaned up,” Shiro says, taking the middle, fence-sitting way. When Keith gives a sharp, jerky nod, Shiro clears his throat, then says, “I’ll go find some more blankets, some clean sheets. Do you— Will you need anything else?”

“No.” Keith’s voice isn’t as emotionless now; it sounds strained, like Keith is trying to keep from yelling. His movements are strained, too: he stands gracelessly, each movement tense and disjointed, like a faulty marionette. 

“Breshik,” Keith says, in a low, low voice, but it’s during a pause in the kid’s crying, and the rest of the room is quiet enough that Shiro catches it. The kid lifts up her arms when Keith reaches out to her, and Keith picks her up, pulling her close as she wraps her arms around his neck. When Keith has vanished the two of them into the attached bathroom, Shiro rises from his mattress himself, standing with a groan and stretching to pop his back.

He doesn’t know how long it will take Keith to clean the kid up, so he moves quickly but quietly, pulling the wet, dirty sheets and blankets from Keith’s bed and bundling them up so that they’re easier to take from the room. There’s a chute out in the hallway that leads down to the Castle’s laundry facilities, and Shiro shoves the bundle into the chute. Either the sheets and blankets can be salvaged, or they can’t; either way, it’s nothing he’s willing to deal with tonight.

He swings by the linen closet, or what passes for an Altean linen closet, and grabs a new set of sheets and blankets. Then he makes a detour to his own room, where he searches out the largest t-shirt he has. When he returns to Keith’s room, the room is still empty and the bathroom door is still closed. 

The mattress is damp, but Shiro isn’t really sure what to do about that, not at this hour of night. He settles for flipping it, telling himself that he can ask Coran how to clean it in the morning. Or, if worse comes to worse, he can just trade it with a mattress from one of the countless, empty rooms of the Castle. For now, flipping it will have to do.

He remakes the bed, the motions ingrained from years at the Garrison: folding, and smoothing, and tucking the sheets tightly around the mattress, until the corners are perfectly squared off. He sets the two pillows at the head of the bed, and lays the blankets at the foot, neatly folded so that they’ll be easy to pull up. Then he folds and lays his shirt on the bed, too, in the empty space between the pillows at the head and the blankets at the foot.

He raps at the bathroom door, just two quick, light taps of his knuckles, and says, “Keith, I left a shirt on the bed. She can use it to sleep in.”

Keith doesn’t respond, but Shiro doesn’t really expect him to. Keith was awkward about accepting kindness long before this; now, Shiro doesn’t know if Keith can even recognize kindness anymore. 

That thought is sobering enough that it sends Shiro staggering back to his mattress in front of the door, feeling more than a little hopeless and more than a little helpless. He lies down on his side, turned to face the door, and he pulls his blanket high up over his shoulder so that the sewn edge of the blanket is scratching at his cheek. He closes his eyes, and he tries to steady his breathing, and he counts slowly and silently in his head. He’s made his way to a hundred several times before the bathroom door finally opens and Keith and the kid come back out.

Shiro keeps his eyes closed and his face turned toward the door, and he listens to the noises of Keith and the kid moving on the other side of the room. The single pair of footsteps of Keith moving toward the bunk, certainly carrying the kid; the low groan of the mattress as Keith settles the kid, and probably himself, on the bed; the rustle of fabric: maybe Shiro’s shirt, or maybe just the blankets. Then it is quiet, and Shiro keeps counting in his head.

When he’s reached one hundred again, and he’s started back over at one, he opens his eyes just a little, just enough to look at the seam where the door meets its frame. 

“Is her name Breshik?” Shiro asks. He regrets it as soon as the words are out of his mouth. He shouldn’t have asked. He shouldn’t have heard. He shouldn’t have been listening so closely, because—well, because. He just shouldn’t have asked, and once he heard, he knew that he was going to ask, because Shiro can never stand not understanding something. 

He hears Keith breathe in sharply, like he’s been punched or shocked—like he was tricked with one of those old toys, the fake packs of gum that would shock you when you tried to pull out a piece. There’s a sick, awful feeling rising in Shiro’s throat. He shouldn’t have asked.

“Yes,” Keith eventually says, his voice a long, long way from toneless, and a long, long way from emotionless. It’s not the type of voice Shiro ever wanted to hear Keith have.

Shiro says, “Oh,” in a quiet voice, then tries to offer, “It’s a pretty name.”

Keith doesn’t say thanks, but then, Keith has nothing to thank Shiro for.

Shiro shouldn’t have asked.


	6. Chapter 6

"Her name is Breshik,” Shiro says as he stirs the breakfast goop that’s been set in front of him.

It’s a pretty full table this morning, if you take things relatively. Six seats are filled, including Shiro’s. There might be two dozen more empty chairs running down the length of the table, but when you’re in space war, things have to be relative, and relatively speaking, six out of thirty-six is practically a full house. (Relatively speaking, two aliens is practically an entire civilization, post-genocide. Or maybe that’s not relative at all. Maybe that’s just the sad facts about war and war crimes.)

“Bresh-what?” Lance asks from across the table as Shiro continues to stir his plate of goop: two stirs clockwise, one stir counter.

“Breshik,” Allura corrects from down the table. She’s setting her spoon down neatly, and she’s practically beaming towards Shiro. Maybe she thinks Keith offered the information willingly; either way, Shiro won’t correct her, not yet. “It’s a lovely name.”

“Is it?” Hunk asks, and Coran jumps in:

“Oh, yes. It’s a type of flower that used to bloom on Daibazaal. Quite a lovely thing,” he says, “though it was a bit rare. I remember that there was work done to crossbreed it into different colors.”

“Breshik,” Allura interrupts, “was a very popular name for Galran girls when I was a child. There was even a character named Breshik in an opera.” She is looking between Shiro and the others, still beaming, and Shiro wonders how she can speak so brightly about the Galra, all things considered. Maybe this is relative, too.

“Oh,” Coran sighs, sounding practically ecstatic, “ _The Theft of the Chalice_. A classic. It might not have been as transcendent as _Ashgul_ , but it was glorious in its own right.” Coran’s face looks a little flushed, and he is looking out across the table, his eyesight trained on something a few feet higher than any of the table’s occupants, like he’s watching a reflection of the opera play out across the dining room’s long walls. When Allura speaks again, Shiro looks toward her and sees that she is looking as enamored and lost in thought as Coran.

“One of Gul’s masterpieces.” When she meets Shiro’s eyes, she seems to sober, her smile cooling and lessening until it looks reserved. “It’s a lovely name,” she says again. “If you would like, I could show you images after breakfast, so that you can understand.”

Shiro clears his throat, then says, “I’d like that. Thank you, Princess.”

After breakfast, Shiro finds himself sitting on one of the sunken couches in the lounge area. Lance had left right after breakfast, yawning and saying that he needed a nap, but everyone else has migrated from the dining room to the lounge. Pidge is sitting cross-legged on Shiro’s left, her hands wrapped around her ankles like she’s trying to hold herself still, and Hunk is sprawled across the couch opposite Shiro and Pidge. Allura is standing at a console in the wall, and Coran is peering over her shoulder as she presumedly searches for images of breshik flowers and whatever else she may want to show them.

“So,” Shiro says as he looks toward Pidge, considering the straight stiffness of her spine and the way her left foot is jiggling, “is opera a big thing for you? Or is it flowers? You look a little . . . .” He trails off, making an exaggerated face at her.

Pidge rolls her eyes, saying, “No, but I don’t—”

“ _Oh_!” Allura’s voice, loud and sudden, startles Shiro, and he looks over toward her. She’s flicking her fingers across the console, a series of taps and swipes, and Coran is looking beside himself.

“A hologram of the entire opera,” he says, sounding like he’s singing the words. He twirls, a madcap flail of limbs that somehow avoids hitting Allura, and repeats for the benefit of everyone on the couch, “A hologram of the entire opera! It’s your lucky day, Paladins. This is a highlight of the Post-Classical period. The arias alone—I can remember,” he says, looking suspiciously misty-eyed, “the first time I saw it performed in its entirety. Ah, I wish I could see it again with new eyes. I envy you.”

“Sounds great,” Hunk says. Shiro squints at him, trying to decide whether Hunk is being serious, as Coran whirls himself onto Hunk’s couch. He’s still squinting when the lights of the room dim and a hologram of a stage lights up in the space between the couches. 

There is a round of applause echoing from all around the room, and Allura is bounding over to the couches, throwing herself into the empty spot to the right of Shiro with more gusto than Shiro thinks he’s ever seen before. 

“It was a live performance at the King’s Theatre,” she gushes at Shiro, and Shiro smiles back at her, echoing Hunk: “Sounds great.”

x

As it turns out, Galran opera isn’t really Shiro’s thing. He gives it his best shot, but he feels himself fading by the third—or fourth?—song. Allura and Coran are giving a running commentary, explaining characters and locations and a world’s worth of history needed for context, but Shiro is hopelessly lost. When there is another round of applause from the invisible audience surrounding them, signaling the end of the scene, Shiro makes his escape. He pushes himself up from the couch and whispers an apology as he crosses in front of Allura, heading for the opening between the couches.

“Shiro?” Allura asks in a whisper. “Are you alright?” She’s turned in her seat, and the light of the hologram spills over her, lighting the left side of her face and shoulder and casting the rest of her body into shadow. Like this, limned by the hologram’s unearthly glow, she looks—Shiro doesn’t know how to describe it. Beautiful, and maybe a little strange; delicate, with the sharp point of her left ear and the dark, brushstroke shadows her hair casts across her neck. She’s a fantastical girl in a fantastical world, and Shiro thinks that he would gladly live and die for her. 

“Shiro?” she asks again, and when she reaches out toward him, the light of the hologram scatters across her body. The shadows look like they’re yawning around her, ready to swallow her whole, and Shiro has to blink hard to rid himself of the image. 

“I’m fine,” he whispers back. The applause has ended, and the characters on the holographic stage are moving as an alien orchestra begins a new song. “Just a little tired.”

The shadows make Allura’s frown look severe, and Shiro thinks, _She is like a faerie queen._ That illogical thought is followed by another: _If I knelt and kissed her hand—_

“Just tired,” he repeats, and when Allura pulls back her hand, he wonders if he is a little disappointed, or if he’s just really tired. Maybe it’s both. 

“Go and rest,” Allura tells him. Shiro nods, and Allura smiles at him before she turns back to the hologram. (When the light hits her face in full, she looks otherworldly; then Shiro scoffs to himself and thinks, _She’s an alien, she’s kinda beyond otherworldly._ )

He wanders aimlessly through the Castle, past Keith’s room and past his own. He feels so tired, and he feels so restless. He has a list of things that he needs to do: make sure Keith’s knee is properly wrapped; talk to Coran about Keith’s mattress; get the rest of the team back into a training schedule; talk to Allura about their makeshift confederation of aliens; win the war against the Galran empire. Each task, though, feels insurmountable—it’s easier to just keep walking.

He wanders past door after door after door, past empty rooms where Alteans used to live. Somewhere between the seventh and tenth hallway, he begins to wonder if the Alteans had ghosts like humans. King Alford—the AI program of King Alford—had been like a ghost, Shiro thinks. Maybe all the Altean ghosts were like that, and now, with the Castle’s system purged, all the Altean ghosts are gone.

Then he wonders if the Galra have ghosts, and if they do, what they haunt. If there’s no Galran home, just like there’s no Altean home, does that mean the Galran ghosts wander through ships like King Alfred had wandered through the Castle?

(When he turns the next corner, he wonders if he has a ghost, too—if there is a piece of him haunting his parents’ home, wandering through the house where he grew up.)

x

The Castle falls into a rhythm over the next couple days, a rigid schedule that feels desperately necessary. Each day is quiet and tense, like they’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop—it doesn’t, though, and another day goes by, and another, and another, each with a grit-your-teeth, clench-your-fists sameness.

Shiro knows that Hunk leaves food outside Keith’s door four times a day: breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner. He knows that Hunk sets the covered plates down in front of the door, then knocks; that Hunk talks sometimes, offering jokes or random stories or anything else Hunk must think is comforting. He knows that Hunk comes back around an hour or so later to gather up the empty dishes that Keith puts back outside the door, and that sometimes Hunk asks how the food was, whether Keith and Breshik want anything in particular for the next meal. (He doesn’t know if Keith ever answers, though, or if Keith is as tight-lipped with Hunk as he is with Shiro.)

And Shiro knows that Pidge visits Keith every day in the midmorning, as regular as a clock. He knows that she knocks, same as Hunk, and he knows that she goes into the room. He thinks she probably sits beside the door; or maybe she sits in the corner to the right of the door, as far from the bunk as she can be while leaving the exit clear. He imagines she talks sometimes, probably gossiping and complaining and offering her sharp, biting commentary on everything she sees and hears; he imagines that other times, she takes her laptop with her and sits in the room quietly, doing her own thing. He thinks that if Keith talks to any of them—not the dull responses Shiro gets, but actual thoughts and feelings and words that mean something—then it’s probably with Pidge.

If Keith is honest with anyone, then Shiro thinks it’s probably with Pidge. It must be with Pidge, because Shiro knows it’s not with him—their conversations are always wrapped in half-truths and silence, because if you can’t say anything nice, then you mustn’t say anything at all. Shiro smiles, and Keith smiles, and they say, _I’m fine_ , and _It’s fine_ , and _Nothing’s changed at all_ , because there’s nothing else they can say that is anywhere close to nice.

Or at least, that’s how it used to be. Now, Keith doesn’t really smile, and Keith doesn’t really say anything, and Shiro thinks that that there must be even fewer nice things left in the universe.

So if there is someone with whom Keith’s honest, then it has to be Pidge, because Pidge curses and digs in her heels and says, _Fuck that noise._ Pidge narrows her eyes and grits her teeth and gets shit done, and Shiro knows that if it came down to a choice, Pidge would choose Matt over anyone else, and she would be fine—and Shiro knows that Keith would have chosen Shiro over anyone else, and he would’ve been fine, too. Now it might be Breshik that Keith would choose, but even if the choice is different, the absoluteness of the choice is the same. In the end, when push comes to shove, Pidge and Keith are uncompromising; Pidge and Keith are merciless in their love and their loyalty. 

Shiro, though, is tender-hearted and guilt-ridden. Shiro feels responsibility like a yoke around his neck, something he’ll never be able to shrug off, and he drags that yoke into Keith’s room every night. He knocks, and he waits; he counts to ten and, when Keith doesn’t answer, he walks into the room. He lies on the mattress that he drags in front of the door each night, and he stares up at the ceiling, listening to Keith and Breshik breathe. 

Sometimes Shiro sleeps, and other times he whispers apologies and promises. Sometimes Breshik wets the bed, and Shiro remakes the bed with clean sheets while Keith helps Breshik clean up in the bathroom. Sometimes Keith sits on the bed, bent over at his waist, his hands folded over his neck and his right foot bouncing like he wants to run. Sometimes—when Breshik is whimpering and Keith is whispering _It was just a dream_ —the yoke feels so heavy that Shiro thinks he may collapse in on himself, crumpling inward like the beginning of a black hole.

(Sometimes Shiro wonders if it’d be a mercy if someone picked up a pillow and pressed it over each of their faces: put out the light, then put out the light. Sometimes he does it to himself—he pulls his pillow over his face, covering his mouth and his nose and his eyes until he has to breathe again. His eyes are so tired of the room’s lights. Christ, he wants a moment of mercy.)

 _We’ll be fine_ , Shiro whispers after he’s uncovered his face again, as he stares up at the lights. He hears Keith whisper back, _It was just a dream._

And then Keith breaks the rhythm, and breaks Lance’s skull at breakfast.

x

Shiro is sitting at the table, feeling bleary-eyed and dazed. He’d spent most of the night staring up at Keith’s ceiling, listening to Keith and Breshik’s breathing. Keith had woken up once, with a strangled gasp that had made Shiro’s heart beat against his ribs like a hammer. 

_Keith_ , Shiro had said in a low voice, _you’ll be fine_ , and Keith had said, _Don’t— Don’t, please—_

And now Shiro is staring at the chair across the table from him, waiting for his body to tell him whether he’ll be staying up or whether he’ll be searching for a quiet place to nap after breakfast. Every time he blinks, his eyes feel like they’re filled with sand, and Shiro had forgotten how heavy his eyelids could feel.

Then Keith walks into the room, his hand wrapped tightly around Breshik’s.

It takes a couple moments for Shiro to recognize both the reality and the enormity of the situation. By the time he has, Keith is sitting on the edge of a chair across the table from Shiro, and Breshik is sitting next to Keith, in a chair that Keith has pulled closer.

“Oh,” Shiro says rather stupidly, and when Keith looks at him from across the table, Shiro smiles awkwardly and offers, “Good morning.”

Keith doesn’t say anything, but he nods. Shiro looks around the table, trying to make sure that the others are reacting to Keith, too, and that Shiro’s neither hallucinating from sleep deprivation nor having a particularly lucid dream.

There are a number of empty chairs between Keith and Breshik and the rest of the table. Pidge is the person who’s sitting closest, three seats farther down the table from Breshik, and her face is turned toward Keith and Breshik. There’s a glare on her glasses, so Shiro can’t see her eyes, but her mouth is open with what looks like surprise, so Shiro cautiously labels Pidge as ‘gobsmacked.’

Allura and Coran are at the other end of the table, to Keith’s right, and they are watching Keith and Breshik as closely as Shiro is watching everyone else. Shiro catches the minute shifting of Allura’s shoulders as she straightens up, the way her chin lifts before she speaks brightly.

“Good morning, Keith. Good morning, Breshik.” Her tone is polite and unconcerned, like she sees Keith and Breshik at the table every morning, like they haven’t been hiding in Keith’s room for two weeks now. 

“It is nice to see you this morning,” she says, like she’s speaking of something as thoughtless and off-hand as the weather or a preferred snack or the color of a shirt: _It’s rather chilly_ and _I think we’ll have crackers_ , _That green is lovely_ and _I’m glad you’re not so feral that you can’t leave your room._ Shiro smiles and feels like he might be going crazy. Maybe they all are.

That is when Lance enters the room near Pidge’s end of the table. Shiro sees the moment that Lance’s eyes widen, and Shiro knows with a certainty as deep as his bones that this about to become a clusterfuck.

“Oh,” Lance says, his long legs taking him past Pidge in fractions of seconds. Shiro stands, snapping out Lance’s name, but Lance is already within arm’s reach of Breshik.

“Hey, is this the kid?” Lance asks, and Breshik makes an awful sound like a dog that has been shot—a guttural kind of wail that feels like it’s digging its way into Shiro’s sternum. And, before Lance has a chance to even look puzzled or startled at the noise, Keith is rising from his seat, turning toward Lance. Keith’s right hand is groping over the table as he’s turning, and he manages to grab a plate, one of the big, heavy plates that are set at each seat. 

There’s nothing fancy about it: Keith doesn’t flip the plate in his hand, or even seem to fix his own balance. He just swings, putting enough of himself into it that it looks like he’s stumbling toward Lance. 

When the plate hits Lance’s head, there is an audible crack, and there is a heavy thud when Lance’s body hits the ground. Breshik is still making the shot-dog sound, and Shiro’s mind notes the way that she’s pulling at Keith’s body, her hands clinging to Keith’s shirt and left arm. Keith’s still holding the plate in his right hand, and he’s staring into the empty space where Lance had been standing just a tick ago, before Keith swung the plate.

From where Shiro’s standing on the other side of the table, Shiro can’t see Lance, and his imagination is way too helpful, offering him images of Lance with his skull caved in, his temple shattered and his brains scrambled.

“Oh, fuck.” It’s Pidge, her voice strained like she’s being strangled. Before Shiro can tell Pidge to stay where she is, Keith is grabbing Breshik, dragging her into his arms. He stumbles as he shoves past the chairs, and Breshik’s shot-dog wail gets louder for a moment before Keith seems to find his balance and strides for the door. It’s not a run, but it’s a near thing, Keith getting himself and Breshik out of the room in a fraction of the time it took them to enter it. Shiro can’t see Keith’s face, but he can see Breshik’s—just a glimpse of her face, from over Keith’s shoulder, as he carries her away: her face is screwed up tight, her eyes shut and her mouth open, her ears lying flat and her hands fisted on the top of her head. 

(She’s cowering, like a beaten dog, like a beaten kid, and Keith’s shoulder doesn’t muffle her whimpers much at all.)

As soon as Keith and Breshik are clear of the door, Shiro’s throwing himself over the table, sliding across the surface on his hip. He crashes into Keith’s chair on the other side, but he manages to control the fall well enough to land—along with the chair—a few feet feet from where Lance is lying on the ground. 

“Coran,” he hears Allura say, her voice still steady, “you’d best prepare a pod.”

He doesn’t hear Coran’s reply, but he does hear Pidge ask, “Holy fuck, is he dead? Shiro?”

“No,” Shiro says when he finds Lance’s pulse, a weak but steady rhythm under Shiro’s fingers.

(Shiro’s hand—Shiro’s _left_ hand—feels so cold.)

Lance looks—well, not good, but not awful, either. There’s blood on his temple where he was struck, and the area is already horribly dark, but it doesn’t look like he’s missing any of his skull, so there’s that. When Allura crouches beside them, Shiro tells her, “Princess, I think we should use a stretcher. I’m not sure how he fell.”

“Of course,” Allura says, and the rising bustle of activity probably does more for calming Shiro’s nerves than anything else. His ability to deal with the aftermath of clusterfucks is far better than his ability to avoid them altogether. Case in point? This entire morning.

Allura leaves, the skirt of her dress brushing against Shiro’s left arm as she rushes past him. Pidge bunches down on the other side of Lance, and Shiro watches as she shifts Lance’s arm enough that she can press her fingers against the pulse point in Lance’s wrist. 

Shiro’s not sure how to answer when she asks, “Do you think?” 

“All I ever really did was CPR training,” he tries to answer. He’s gingerly touching Lance’s limbs with his left hand: tentatively feeling Lance’s right upper arm, then checking the pulse in Lance’s neck; tentatively feeling Lance’s right forearm, then checking Lance’s pulse again. He doesn’t trust his right arm for this—doesn’t trust the feedback to be delicate enough or real enough.

Lance’s pulse is still beating steadily when Allura returns a few minutes later, stretcher in hand. Between the three of them, they get Lance shifted onto the stretcher without any real problem. Lance’s body is floppy, but considering way Keith had swung—well, floppy isn’t a bad thing, really, and it doesn’t seem like Lance has any broken bones, other than Lance’s face.

Lance is strapped to a stretcher and Shiro and Allura are counting together, “One, two, _lift—_ ” when Hunk enters the room, bearing a platter of oddly colored fruit. 

“‘Scuse us,” Shiro grunts, and Hunk steps to the side, leaving enough room in the doorway that Shiro and Allura can squeeze past him, angling Lance’s stretcher through the opening. Shiro glances at Hunk as he passes him, and Hunk looks as gobsmacked at this as Pidge had looked when Keith and Breshik had entered the dining room ten minutes ago. 

“What happened?” Shiro hears Hunk ask as Shiro and Allura carry Lance from the room. When Shiro strains his ears, he can hear Pidge answer, “Keith freaked out. I think he broke Lance’s skull.”


	7. Chapter 7

As it turns out, Keith did break Lance’s skull. Lance is in the pod for a few hours, and when he leaves, there’s still a tender-looking bruise on his temple. Lance looks flustered, or maybe sheepish, and Shiro bites back the desire to scold him, because this isn’t Lance’s fault, not really. It’s not really anyone’s fault, or at least not anyone on the Castle. It’s the fault of the druids, the Galra who locked up two kids together and used them against each other.

“Sorry,” Lance says. He’s avoiding Shiro’s eyes, and Shiro feels that yoke of guilt settle back down on his shoulders. He reaches out to clap Lance’s arm, and when Lance sneaks a look at him, Shiro smiles as gently as he can.

“It’s not your fault,” he offers Lance. “If you hadn’t startled them, then someone or something else would’ve. Now we know,” he says, and he lifts his voice a little, looking over toward the others clustered in the room, “and we’ll all be more careful about giving Breshik and Keith the space they need.”

“Of course,” Allura says calmly, like this isn’t a problem.

Shiro nods, then backs off as Hunk and Coran pull Lance into a circle of sympathetic noises. Lance is still looking pale and uncomfortable and just generally down-and-out, and Shiro really does feel as sympathetic as Hunk and Coran look. Keith could be prickly back when they were at the Garrison, when getting scooped in lab or short-sheeted in the dorms or passed over in practicals were the biggest threats; here in the Castle, post-capture and post-Galra and post-the-unknown-quantity of all those months Keith was gone, Keith is far past prickly. Shiro has to be sympathetic, because Shiro doesn’t understand Keith, either. 

He watches Hunk push Lance down into a chair, then turns away. He should think of something else to say, some way to assure Lance; he should explain—excuse?—Keith’s actions to Allura; he should—

“You or me?” Pidge asks, popping up in front of Shiro without any warning. Shiro feels himself reel back at her sudden appearance, and Pidge smiles up at him strangely, like an awkward apology; Shiro doesn’t know if the maybe-apology is for startling him or for noticing that he’s been startled. Maybe, since it’s Pidge, it’s for both.

“You or me what?” Shiro asks in turn, taking a small step back so he can resettle himself. Pidge’s smile grows more awkward, more like an up-turned scowl.

“Which one of us do you want to talk to Keith? You or me?

“I don’t,” she goes on as Shiro feels his jaw tighten, “think we should let him be alone much longer. I don’t think he’s, y’know, dangerous, but.” She shrugs and cocks her head to the side, and the gesture speaks volumes more than her words. “So, which one of us?”

Shiro breaths in and out, then gives into the desire to rub his hand over his eyes. When he opens his eyes again, to look back down at Pidge, she’s staring up at him patiently, her eyes looking big and clear behind her glasses.

“Has he,” Shiro asks her slowly, not sure what answer he wants to hear, “been talking to you?”

Pidge makes that shrugging gesture again and tells him, “Not really. He doesn’t really talk when I’m in the room, just mostly to Breshik.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, speaking a little more quietly, fighting the urge to look over his shoulder and check for eavesdroppers. “It’s about the same with me.”

“Then I vote for you,” Pidge says. When Shiro jerks his chin to the side, just a tiny movement, she says, “You’re the leader, and you’re his friend, and—I dunno—you’re his mentor? 

“I think,” she says, as quietly as Shiro, like they’re speaking secrets to each other, “that he trusts you more than anyone else right now, and I think you’ll be able to make him actually talk about things. He’ll just ignore me if he wants, you know that. 

“A controlled explosion,” she says to Shiro, “is always better than an uncontrolled one.” Her eyes move, glancing to the side, past Shiro’s shoulder, and Shiro is certain she’s looking at where Lance is sitting with his head in his hands, being coddled by Hunk. “I think you need to make him vent, Shiro.”

Shiro covers his face with his left hand, not even pretending to pinch the bridge of his nose or to rub his eyes; Pidge has to know that he’s hiding, so what’s the point in pretending? He feels like it’s been years since breakfast, like every minute between then and now is a decade of weight dropped onto his shoulders. He wants to copy Lance: sit down, put his head in his hands, and let someone else deal with all the problems, at least for a few minutes.

When Pidge clears her throat, a pointedly obtrusive noise, Shiro sighs and wipes his hand down his face.

“When you go in the room, where do you sit?” he asks her. Pidge takes the question seriously, frowning as she looks up at Shiro.

“I sit on your bed sometimes,” she says, “if Keith doesn’t seem too stressed. Not,” she grimaces, “that he ever really seems unstressed. But, y’know, if he’s just ignoring me.”

She blinks behind her glasses, then continues: “If he’s watching the door when I come in, I’ll sit in the corner, past your bed.”

Considering the layout—bunk, mattress, corners, and door—that leaves a clear line to the exit. Pidge echoes Shiro’s thoughts, saying, “Clear exit. Figure it can’t hurt.”

“No,” Shiro agrees quietly, “it can’t.”

x

When he knocks at Keith’s door, his left hand is cold and clammy. He knocks three times— _rap rap rap_ with his knuckles—then opens his hands, spreading his fingers wide before he wipes his left palm against his trouser leg. He counts to ten, mouthing the words silently like he does every day, and when there is no answer, he opens the door.

The room looks mostly the same as it did this morning, when Shiro had left for breakfast: the mattress he sleeps on at night is lying on the floor to the side of the door, the blanket and pillow neatly folded and stacked at its head; the bed where Keith and Breshik sleep is also made up, the blankets tucked in and smoothed down. There are a few little things scattered around: a shirt lying on the floor and a tablet resting near the foot of the bed, and something that looks like a doll sitting propped against the base of the bunk.

In short, the room looks empty. There’s not much by way of personal things, no real possessions or marks of individual personalities. There’s also, Shiro realizes when he looks past Keith, who’s standing in front of the bed, no sign of Breshik.

“Where,” Shiro asks, his throat gone tight and hot with a burst of fear, “is Breshik?”

Keith’s mouth tightens, but it doesn’t open, and he doesn’t say a word. Shiro looks around the room again, but there is still no Breshik—not on the bed, or hiding behind Keith’s legs. Shiro turns and rushes toward the attached bathroom. The door slides open when he palms the lock, and the lights flash on when he takes a step inside.

The bathroom is tiny, maybe all of six squared feet. On the right side there is a toilet with an attached sink above it, and to the left there is a series of fixtures like shower heads. The bathroom is all uniform in material, a cool, smooth series of tiles with grooves to catch running water and carry it to the the drains that run along the three walls. There’s no delineation between toilet space and shower space—no tub or shower curtain where a little kid can hide. There’s no cabinet, either. There is nowhere for a kid to hide in here, but Shiro still looks around the tiny room once, twice, three times, turning himself in tight circles in the cramped space. 

He can feel himself beginning to grow frantic, and his legs feel like they’re turning numb, from his thighs down to his feet. On his third turn, he feels his right knee begin to buckle, and he throws his hand against the wall, trying to steady himself.

There is no Breshik.

(Hamsters, he knows, eat their young. One of the third-grade teachers at his elementary school had pet hamsters in the classroom, and one time, one of the hamsters ate all of her babies. 

_She was afraid,_ Ms. Arroyo had told them. _Sometimes, if hamsters are scared, or if their babies smell wrong, they’ll eat their babies._ )

Shiro leaves the bathroom door open behind him when he returns to the bedroom. His legs feel unsteady, like he’s walking over moving ground, and he thinks he can feel his hands shaking. Keith hasn’t stepped from his spot in front of his bed, but he’s turned enough to watch Shiro in the bathroom. He’s watching Shiro now, his mouth pressed into a thin line and his hands curled into fists, and Shiro hears himself ask again, his voice louder and sharper: “Keith, where is Breshik?”

“She’s fine,” Keith says lowly, in the same flat tone he uses every day when Shiro questions him: _She’s fine_ , and _I’m fine_ , and _We’re fine_ ; _It’s fine_ and _Whatever you want_. When Shiro says Keith’s name again, Keith says louder, in a voice that is beginning to sound bitter or maybe distrusting, “She’s someplace safe.”

“Someplace safe?” Shiro parrots back. Keith doesn’t clarify, though, and Shiro has to wonder what the fuck safety means to Keith. 

( _Sometimes,_ Ms. Arroyo had said, _if mothers feel like they can’t keep their babies safe, they’ll eat them._ )

“Keith,” Shiro says, “I really need you to explain things right now. I need you to tell me,” he says, hearing his voice growing sharper as Keith looks away, “why you think Breshik is safe, and where she is.”

Keith holds his tongue long enough that Shiro is wondering if asking him is a lost cause. The Castle is huge, though. The Castle was built to hold hundreds, or maybe thousands, and Shiro will never be able to find Breshik on his own. There are too many places a child can be tucked away, and desperation is the mother of invention; Keith hid her, and if Keith doesn’t want her to be found, then she won’t be found.

“Keith,” Shiro begs, “I promise I won't go get her. Just tell me where she is.”

When Keith answers, it is grudgingly: “She’s in the lion. My lion.”

And okay. That’s. That’s okay. Shiro will never pretend to understand how the lions actually function, but he knows that if something was really wrong—if Breshik was actually not okay—the lions would probably be throwing fits all over their hangars. If Breshik is in the Red Lion, and if the Red Lion (and the rest of the lions in turn) is silent and presumedly content, it stands to reason that Breshik is actually safe. Safe, and whole, and at least physically unharmed. (He doesn’t want to think about what she must be feeling, if she’s cowering or crying or wondering if Keith will be able to come back for her.)

Shiro’s knees give out then, buckling under the rush of relief that comes over him. He sits heavily—or falls, to be honest—lowering his head and crossing his hands over the back of his neck. His breathing is still mostly steady, but he’s feeling more than a little lightheaded. Christ.

“Christ,” he whispers, and he doesn’t feel guilty at all when he hears Keith shift a few feet away. _Christ_. 

“She’s safe there,” Keith’s voice says, sounding slow and hesitant. “My lion won’t let anyone in—”

“I know,” Shiro interrupts. He’s not quite sure when he closed his eyes—probably right after he had to put his head down to keep from passing out. He digs his thumbs into the nape of his neck, then opens his eyes and lifts his head, looking up at Keith. Keith’s hands are still clenched into tight fists, and his mouth is closed, too, the same tight line it was when Shiro entered the room a few minutes ago. This isn’t going well.

Shiro needs to slow down. Calm down. Talk them both down. This is all going wrong from the start, and this no-longer-Keith isn’t someone Shiro understands anymore. This is like walking along an ocean cliff, and if he goes too fast, if he goes too recklessly, he’s going to slip and fall and probably drag the entire Castle down with him.

“Keith,” Shiro asks, willing himself—his voice and his words and his fucking heart—to go slow slow _slow_ , “do you feel like your room isn’t safe?”

Keith’s mouth purses tightly and stays pointedly shut. Shiro takes it in, Keith’s face and posture, the way Keith’s torso is leaning back, and he thinks, _No, Keith isn’t stupid enough to answer that._

Keith isn’t stupid enough to answer most questions, not when he’s feeling stubborn or angry. Keith keeps his mouth shut when he doesn’t want to give things away. Keith, though, makes up for his silence with his face and his body, the way he fidgets then goes still, the tics of motion in his face and hands and feet. Keith is a walking silent film, and while nuance can be a struggle, the minute differences between irritation or anger lost in the scowling of Keith’s mouth, the broad strokes of emotion are easy to find and interpret.

This Keith, standing just out of arms’ reach, is angry and afraid.

“Keith,” Shiro says again, changing tactics, “I want you to feel safe in your room, and I want you to feel like Breshik is safe in here, too.”

Keith’s answer is given slowly and grudgingly: “I do.”

(Keith doesn’t really lie, not unless it’s for someone else.)

(This is a lie, and Shiro wonders if the lie is meant for Shiro or if it’s meant for Breshik.)

“Okay,” Shiro says peaceably, because if Keith is lying—and if he’s lying so _blatantly_ —it’s for a reason. Keith frowns down at Shiro, looking distrusting, and Shiro shrugs in turn. “As long as you feel safe, here or in your lion.”

Keith is still frowning, like he’s trying to figure out how or why Shiro might be lying to him. Shiro smiles for as long as he can—it’s not very long—and says, “I’m just glad you and Breshik are okay. That’s what matters, y’know? That you’re okay, both of you.

“Lance is okay, too.” Shiro shifts so that he’s sitting cross-legged, leaning back on his hands. It leaves his body posture open and relaxed, and he hopes that Keith believes it. “He’s got a bit of a bruise, but that’s it. He said he’s sorry, by the way.”

Keith doesn’t say anything—no surprise there—but Shiro sees the way Keith’s fists tighten. That’s not a surprise, either. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (which Shiro partially is), or an actual therapist (which Shiro definitely isn’t) to figure out that Keith is afraid of punishment. Retaliation. Backlash. 

It also doesn’t take much to connect Keith’s fear to Breshik’s absence.

“Keith,” Shiro asks, “is that why you hid Breshik? Because Lance got hurt?”

( _Because Lance got hurt,_ he says. Passive, not active; there’s no actor in Lance’s injury, no blame to be portioned out.)

It is a long time before Keith answers, long enough that Shiro’s left hand is beginning to tingle beneath his weight as he leans back.

“They beat her.” Keith says this in a voice that sounds unnaturally calm, and he blinks at the end of the words. Then he blinks again before he adds, “They beat her a lot. If I—” He pauses and moves his hand in a short, abortive jerk inwards, toward his stomach. “If I fought, or if I argued. If I was too slow.”

Shiro nods as Keith speaks, and when Keith goes quiet, Shiro presses his lips tightly together. All the conversational sounds he knows—the thoughtless _okays_ and _yeahs_ —feel wrong. Really, everything feels wrong. He tries out a tentative, “I’m sorry.”

Keith shrugs at that, like this is an innocuous back-and-forth: _It started to rain when I was walking home,_ and _Oh, I’m sorry_. Nothing big, nothing major; nothing that will tear anyone apart. His face, though, is beginning to look pinched again. Shiro can see it, the way Keith’s eyebrows are beginning to pull closer together and his chin is beginning to jut out.

“They beat her the first day,” Keith says, and the calmness in his voice sounds like it is starting to fray. “They brought her in and they beat her. They said it was for me, then they left her.”

Sorries aren’t enough—can’t be enough. Shiro bites back his sorries, bites his tongue, but Keith is well and truly scowling now, glaring down at the floor in between them. When the silence has gone on too long—maybe only a minute or so, but long enough that Shiro can feel the itch of fear climb up along his spine—Shiro says Keith’s name in a low voice.

It yanks Keith’s attention back, and when Keith turns his scowl down toward Shiro, Shiro has to clench his hands and grit his teeth to keep from crawling backwards. 

“I thought,” Keith says to him, “that she was going to die that night.” He laughs then, a short, breath-like kind of laugh, like he’s scoffing at himself. “The Galra aren’t like us, though.

“Like humans, I mean,” Keith corrects himself, and the speed with which he corrects himself makes Shiro feel faint. “Their physiology, and stuff. They heal faster, and they’re just.” Keith shrugs again, like he can’t find the right words, or like he doesn’t want to bother trying to find the right words. “Tougher, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, grasping onto that thought, because it gives him a way to respond. “I can see that. They’re—The Galra I’ve met have always seemed stronger.”

Then Keith says, “That meant they could beat her when they couldn’t beat me.”

Shiro should’ve seen that coming. It’s nothing new; he had figured out that Breshik was used against Keith when he’d first walked into their prison cell. He knows that the Galra use corporal punishment, and he knows that the Galra will use prisoners’ feelings and attachments against them. It’s been obvious from the start that Breshik was hurt to keep Keith in line.

Where Shiro had failed to draw the connection, though, was between the points of Breshik being Galran and what it takes to hurt a Galran person; he hadn’t drawn the line from _they’re tougher_ and _they heal faster_ to _they could hurt her more than they could hurt me_. Once Shiro sees the connection, though, he understands it. It makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. The Galra don’t know that Keith is part Galra, and even if they did—or do—Keith’s physiology is really pretty much baseline human. Shiro has seen Keith walk off shit that Shiro’s never seen any other human walk off, but at the end of the day, Keith would never be able to survive the type of injuries that Galran soldiers seem to bounce back from. So—take the prisoner you can’t actually beat, and shackle him with a prisoner you can; isolate them together, and let the guilt do the work for you. 

It is, in a word, brilliant. Ingenious. Horrific. 

“She was your whipping boy,” Shiro says, feeling breathless at the thought. Keith’s scowl spasms, like he’s trying to frown more, but can’t actually make his face hold that fierce of a frown. 

“I don’t,” Keith begins to say, but he cuts himself off, turning his face away with a sharp shake of his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

Shiro knows Keith, though, and he feels out the words as he says them, trying to find an explanation in them, “A whipping boy. They punished her because they couldn’t punish you. They used her—the, uh, threat of hurting her—to control you. To get what they wanted.”

And then, as he clenches his fists tightly to keep himself from reaching out toward Keith, Shiro asks, “Keith, what did they want?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm "itssummaawilum" on Tumblr. I'm super awkward, but please come and say hi! I love talking with people.


End file.
